While Evan Roscoe is a Napa native, he grew up far from Napa’s wine culture. So far, in fact, that his family’s mountainside cabin was technically on the Solano side of the county line. There wasn’t wine on the table growing up, and his family had no connections to the wine business.

Evan left Napa for college in Chicago and eventually found his way into hospitality and bar management. He returned home after the 2017 fires to find a wine industry already reeling, at the beginning of what would become a long stretch of calamities, corrections, and a few brief booms over the next eight years.

In that time, Evan formed some strong opinions about how the wine industry presents itself to the public and how it operates behind the scenes. With a keen sense of aesthetics and a sharp instinct for storytelling, he has turned his creative director skill set into a mirror held up to the industry itself.

Evan now posts provocative, thought-provoking reels nearly every day on Instagram @Evan__Roscoe, punctuated with taglines like “Wine is fucked” and “Wine is boring.” After months of sharing, reposting, and commenting on his work, and watching colleagues across the country do the same, we realized we needed to hear directly from Evan Roscoe himself.

Sit down, pour a glass, and settle in for this one. Evan has a lot to say. [Ep 397]