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.
In this conversation:
- The vocalist-to-wine comparison game, including her pick for a Whitney Houston wine
- How the 2008 recession led her from a graphic design job to a wine bar in Reno
- The Chateau de Montfaucon 2005 Côtes du Rhône that broke her idea of what wine could taste like
- The flavor cards that became the first version of Wine Folly
- Why AI is now answering wine questions with her own decade of work, uncredited
- Her current obsessions: Slovenia's Goriška Brda region and Hungarian Hárslevelű
- Biking through Alto Adige with sommelier Aldo Sohm
- Hiring a Master of Wine to challenge her own teaching model
- Why sandy soil doesn't fully explain a lighter-bodied Gamay
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Wine Folly: www.winefolly.com
Madeline's Instagram: @madelinepuck
Wine Folly's Instagram: @winefolly