about The Best 5 Minute Wine

Podcast

We’re not here to impress wine experts. We’re here to make you one.

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THE WORLD’S BEST WINE PODCAST.

In 5 minutes or less.

Here’s the thing about wine education: it got weird.

Somewhere between the blind tastings and the 90-minute deep dives on malolactic fermentation, wine podcasting forgot who it was actually talking to. Real people. People with jobs, families, short commutes, and a bottle of something interesting sitting on the counter.

The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast was built for them.

Forrest Kelly spent two decades behind a microphone — interviewing Hollywood names like Kevin Costner and Garth Brooks, covering stories that mattered, learning how to make anyone interesting in three minutes or less. Then he turned that same skill on the one subject he couldn’t stop reading about: wine. Not wine as a status symbol. Wine as a story. The family that’s been farming the same hillside in Sonoma for six generations. The winemaker who quit a tech career to start from scratch in Napa. Each week, Forrest sits down with the winemakers, Master Sommeliers, chefs, and wine world obsessives quietly doing the most interesting work in the glass — and gives you the best of every conversation in five minutes flat. The result? A podcast voted one of the Top Wine Podcasts, Top Travel Podcasts, and Top 5-Minute Podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Our Story

The Beginning

It began with a plan I kept to myself — a quiet, stubborn kind of secret I carried like a warm glass in my hand. I booked a wine tour in Temecula Valley for February 13, 2016, and told no one that the last stop would be the place I asked Paula to spend the rest of her life with me.

The Journey

We rode with a small, impossibly friendly group in a modified Jeep. The tour was alive with laughter; our host moved through the day like someone who loved what they did. My dad drove to the final winery so he could capture the moment on video. I worked with the restaurant manager to create a custom menu for the evening — a little theatrical, a little ridiculous, and entirely mine.

The Moment

When the menu arrived, the page I’d prepared was all seafood — Paula hates seafood. The look on her face as she read it was everything: confused, dismayed, then utterly stunned. It’s a look I still keep in my pocket. At the previous stop, our group had lingered too long over tastings and the energy was getting rowdy. I can still hear our guide’s voice cutting through the noise: Hurry up, you’re taking too long — Forrest is proposing to Paula at our last stop and you guys are ruining it.
They laughed and ran to the Jeep, and the rest of the night felt like a private world opening just for us.

Why It Matters

That evening — the small, absurd details, the people who helped, the imperfect menu, my dad’s shaky camera — all of it became the kind of story I want to tell again and again. It’s how wine became such a big part of my life.

The Podcast

And why I make this podcast: to find the human moments behind the bottle, the little surprises that make life taste better.

5 minutes. One wine story. Zero pretension.

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