Wine Folly: Madeline Puckette On Getting Laid Off and Accidentally Building a Wine Media Empire

Madeline Puckette didn't set out to build Wine Folly. She lost her graphic design job in the 2008 recession, followed a boyfriend to Reno, and picked up a stack of wine encyclopedias from a bar owner who needed help on slow nights. None of it was the plan. Nearly two decades later, she's the Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer of one of the most recognizable names in wine education, co-author of a New York Times bestseller and a James Beard Award winner, and the person whose visual framework AI chatbots now use to answer wine questions without crediting her.

That unplanned path runs through a wide-ranging conversation: the bottle that broke her mental model of what wine could even taste like (it smelled like black olives), the flavor cards she doodled behind a wine bar that became the seed of Wine Folly, and why she thinks the wine world's go-to explanation for sandy soil is often wrong.

Madeline is the Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer of Wine Folly under Folly Enterprises, co-author of two books (a New York Times bestseller and a James Beard Award winner), and has appeared in Jason Wise's Somm: Into the Bottle and Somm 3.

LISTEN:
https://share.transistor.fm/s/1843d0ce

EPISODE PARTNERS:
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KEYWORDS:
WineFolly, MadelinePuckette, WineEducation, WinePodcast, WineCentricShow, SommTV, WineTasting, WineCommunity, WinePairing, LearnWine, WineForBeginners, JasonWise, Winemaking, WineIndustry, WineNerd, GamayWine, Beaujolais, SlovenianWine, HungarianWine, InVintory