Wine has always been a conversation. It starts at a table, someone tops up a glass, and an hour later you know a stranger’s whole life story. So it’s no surprise that wine and podcasts fit together so well. This International Podcast Day (30 September), let’s look at where wine podcasting began, where it is now, and where it might go next.
The past: a bet on audio
Podcasts are younger than you’d think. The term itself was coined in 2004, when journalist Ben Hammersley used the word in an article for The Guardian, and former MTV VJ Adam Curry, working with software developer Dave Winer, built the technology that let audio files download automatically onto an iPod. Curry’s own show, Daily Source Code, is widely considered the first true podcast.
For the next decade, the format grew quietly rather than explosively. Apple added podcasts to iTunes in 2005 and built a directory for them, which made shows far easier to find and subscribe to. Early hits like This Week in Tech and The Ricky Gervais Show built loyal followings, and by 2014 Apple had passed one billion podcast subscriptions. But it was still seen as a niche, DIY medium; something you needed to know about to stumble across. Then, in late 2014, This American Life launched a spinoff called Serial. The true-crime series became the fastest podcast ever to hit five million downloads on iTunes, and between 2013 and 2015 the number of people listening to podcasts is estimated to have doubled. Serial didn’t invent podcasting, but it proved to a mainstream audience that the format could hold them for hours, and everything after 2014 built on that.
Wine podcasts were slower to take off. When the Italian Wine Podcast launched in March 2017, it was billed as the first English-language podcast dedicated exclusively to Italian wine and its personalities.
Founder Stevie Kim was betting on a format most of the wine world hadn’t embraced yet. In a 2018 interview with The Drinks Business, she admitted podcasts weren’t popular with winemakers, but she believed audio was the way forward. Attention is scarce, she argued, and listeners are loyal to the shows they love, whether they’re driving, working out or travelling. You can hear Stevie tell her own story in Ep. 1063.
The bet paid off. The show hit 1,000 episodes and three million listens in June 2022, and on 18 October 2025 it aired its 2,500th episode. That’s a milestone few podcasts of any kind reach, and it’s now billed as the most prolific wine podcast on the airwaves. The episode count is now approaching 2,800, with new episodes every single day.
The present: the people take the microphone
The biggest change podcasts brought to wine is who gets to speak. Traditional wine media was often filtered through critics and glossy pages. A podcast hands the microphone straight to the producer, the winemaker, the sommelier, the importer, the agronomist.
Listen to the series recorded at the Bologna Slow Wine Fair in 2023, where Stevie Kim and her team interviewed dozens of producers in their own words. Or Ep. 2447, where Jessica Dupuy explores the connections between wine, people and place at TEXSOM. The 2,500th-episode celebration brought together hosts from many backgrounds, including Barbara Fitzgerald, Cynthia Chaplin, Juliana Colangelo, Marc Millon, Monty Waldin and Steve Raye. Different accents and different perspectives, all sharing one table.
Italian voices have space here too. Professor Attilio Scienza’s shows are generally recorded in Italian, like Ep. 2025, where he takes questions from the wine community. Earlier episodes recorded in Italian, such as his talk on Sangiovese, were also released with English versions so nothing gets lost in translation. It’s an easy way to let a producer or scientist speak in their own language and still be understood around the world.
With so many wine podcasts now out there, finding the good ones has become its own challenge, which is exactly the gap the Wine Podcast Directory was built to fill. Put together with an advisory board of wine communication voices, including Jackson Family Wines’ Kristen Reitzell, Colangelo & Partners’ Juliana Colangelo, and wine media leader Felicity Carter, it’s a curated guide to the 100 best wine podcasts out there, organised by category so you can actually find something new to listen to instead of scrolling blindly. As Stevie Kim put it when the directory launched, everyone and their nonna seems to have a podcast these days. The directory is one way of making sense of that.
Where podcasting stands today
Nearly a decade on from Serial, podcasting has gone from niche to genuinely mainstream, and also, by most measures, more crowded than ever. There are now well over four million podcasts registered worldwide, though only a small fraction, generally estimated at under half a million, are still actively publishing. Global monthly listenership is estimated at somewhere around 600 to 670 million people in 2026, up double digits year on year, and in the US alone more than half of people aged 12 and up now listen monthly.
The bigger shift is where people are doing that listening. Video has crept into a format that used to be purely audio, and YouTube has overtaken dedicated podcast apps as the single most used platform for podcast consumption in some markets. That’s changed what a “podcast” even looks like: a lot of shows now film their conversations as well as record them, so a listener can watch a producer’s face while they talk about their harvest. Genre-wise, true crime remains enormous, but food, wine, and lifestyle shows have carved out steady, loyal audiences of their own; smaller than the biggest hits, but famously sticky, since podcast listeners tend to follow a handful of shows closely rather than skipping between hundreds.
Has the format peaked? The numbers don’t suggest that yet. Growth has slowed from its most explosive years, but it’s still growth, and the audience keeps getting more international, with markets outside the US and UK expanding fastest. What has changed is that simply having a podcast is no longer enough to stand out. It’s a mature medium now, more like publishing a book than launching something experimental, which makes tools like the Wine Podcast Directory more useful, not less.
Long format vs short format: a friendly rivalry
Short-form video has changed how wine gets discovered. As we heard in Ep. 2711, if you want to reach a younger drinker you need to be where they are, and that means TikTok. In Ep. 2742, Molly Bossardt made a point every winery should hear: education should never lead. People want your story and your identity first, and the facts can follow.
That’s where the two formats complement each other. Short clips are the front door: quick, fun and easy to share. A long-form podcast is the dinner table you get invited to afterwards. It has room for the tangent, the laugh, the unexpected memory about a grandfather’s vineyard. Wine is a slow subject, and it rewards a slow listen. You can’t really rush a conversation about a family estate that’s been around for generations.
The voice matters
There’s something a podcast does that text and video can’t quite match. A voice carries warmth, hesitation, pride, and the smile of someone talking about their harvest. When a winemaker pauses before answering, you feel it. Podcasts also travel. They go with you on the commute, on a run, or while you cook dinner, which is exactly the setting wine belongs in.
The future: more voices, more places, more Cin Cin
So what comes next? We can’t predict it exactly, but the signs point in a few directions. The show is already moving beyond the studio. Some episodes are recorded live at events, such as the one from Grandi Langhe 2026, and Stevie regularly heads out on the road to visit wineries in person, as in Ep. 2054. Video and social clips are giving these conversations a second life.
Our hope is that the next chapter has even more voices: more regions, more young producers, more languages, and more people who never thought wine was a conversation they were invited to. If the last nine years are any guide, it will get there one episode at a time.
Your turn this Podcast Day
On 30 September, pick an episode that fits your mood. Go long with a producer from a region you’ve never visited, or press play on a masterclass that changes how you think about wine. Then share it with a friend, ideally over a glass. Or better still, drop us a line (or comment) and let us know where you’d like to see the Italian Wine Podcast go next.
Cin cin, and happy International Podcast Day!
