Thirty-five years. Same 800 number. Still picking up.

That's Premium Blend in a nutshell — built on relationships, consistency, and a product that just keeps finding new audiences. In this final episode of the series, Gino Santos gives Forrest a full picture of where the brand is headed and what it looks like at home.

Highlights include:

• A new Aguardiente (Colombian-style spirit) launching just ahead of the FIFA World Cup, with Miami games on the schedule and Premium Blend accounts already lining up launch parties
• The long-term retail vision: getting agave wine and other products onto shelves at stores like Ralph's so consumers can take them home
• The Santos family holiday table — roast pork, black beans and rice, and the Cuban flag in food form, shared with three generations across Miami, Jacksonville, and Nashville
• The full drink lineup for that dinner: Santos Sangria (100% Spanish origin, grandmother's old family recipe), rum and Cokes made with Rumbero, vodka sodas made with Clear Red, and after-dinner pours of Failing Irish Cream (produced in Ireland) and Cafe Luna coffee liqueur
• Why the margarita quietly became America's number one cocktail — and what the tequila boom means for Premium Blend's agave wine collection
• How Premium Blend supports its accounts beyond the sale: recipe books, promotional materials, and hands-on drink-making help

A fitting close to a five-part series packed with business insight, immigrant grit, family pride, and genuinely great product storytelling.

📞 Premium Blend toll-free: 800-899-0331 🌐 premiumblend.com

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Maryse Chevriere's illustrations — a little figure she simply calls "my little dude." He's intentionally universal, someone anyone can see themselves in, though she'll add a ponytail, a bow tie, or a mustache when a drawing calls for it. Forrest zeroes in on a favorite: a "greets you with… but hits you in the face" illustration featuring the character at a microphone under a spotlight, arms up as if shielding himself. Maryse explains the improv-style thinking behind it — "greets you with" is the chill, gentle version of describing a wine's notes, while "hits you in the face" is the version where lemon, lime, and green bell pepper smack you so hard you can't miss it. The whole thing is built around a punchy Sauvignon Blanc (or, in Forrest's Boston translation, a "Savvy B").

Then the practical heart of the episode: who is the book for? Maryse describes it as ideal for newer wine appreciators looking to level up, or anyone who wants a fun, flip-through companion for a glass of wine — originally imagined as a coffee-table book. It's rich with 101-level information, but polished enough that professionals will recognize their own wine-speak and chuckle. Above all, it's a wine book that doesn't feel like a textbook, and a great gift for anyone who loves wine.

Maryse takes the open mic to acknowledge the people behind the book: her mom, aunt, and in-laws (who bought and promoted copies), her publishers who finally saw a vision she'd carried for years, her friends Annie, Jess, and Laura, and especially her husband, who held her together while she wrote and illustrated the book through her pregnancy. There's a warm, funny riff about family members enthusiastically promoting her at local wine shops — her mom being the biggest cheerleader of all — and even getting her book and drawings into a charity silent auction.

She closes with where to find everything: Instagram at Freshcutgardenhose, prints and custom work at fcghstudio.com, and the book at Amazon, local bookshops, and Barnes & Noble — or search "How to Sound Wine Smart" at SimonandSchuster.com for every retailer. A warm, generous send-off to a standout series.

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Every great business has a moment when the founder walks into a stranger's establishment and has to sell the dream from scratch. For Gino Santos, that pitch had three parts: increase your margins, keep your customers coming back, and make your wait staff more money — all with just a beer and wine license.

In this final installment of the Premium Blend series, Forrest gets the full story:

• Why Premium Blend launched in plastic bottles — a practical shipping decision when you're self-distributing across Florida with almost no capital
• Why plastic has actually become a selling point for bars and restaurants where dropped bottles are a real cost
• The three-part sales pitch Gino used to walk cold into venues: higher profit margins, increased customer retention, and bigger tips for waitstaff
• How Premium Blend sales presentations work — Henry and Gino would show up with bags of product like they were moving in, letting everyone taste everything
• Blind taste tests against actual rum, tequila, and more — and why the cocktails are indistinguishable
• Pricing breakdown: roughly $8–$10 per liter depending on state alcohol tax
• The philosophy behind the business: owning a company, not just having a job
• A moving tribute to their late father, Orestes Santos — the Cuban musician who said "we didn't come here to take, we came here to give" — and what he would think seeing his sons build something that employs people and sustains small businesses across the country

Learn more at premiumblend.com

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The series wraps by going back to the beginning. Maryse Chevriere opens with the closure debate and dismantles an old-school myth: you absolutely can have great wine under a screwcap — some of the world's best Rieslings are sealed that way. She gets the confusion, since screwcaps are also a cheaper closure found on inexpensive bottles, but her position is simple: if the wine is good, she doesn't care how it's sealed. Corkscrews have more flair, sure, and she offers a pro tip on the trickier wax-topped bottles — drive the corkscrew straight in rather than trying to peel all the wax off first.

Then a quiz question with real teaching value: when an expert calls a wine "approachable," they mean it's easy to drink and enjoyable right now — friendly, no curveballs. Not a polite way of saying cheap, though your greatest Barolo, Bordeaux, or Champagne probably isn't "approachable" in the same way. Think Tuesday-night wine rather than Friday date-night bottle.

Maryse also shares the human side: the close-minded customer she'd love to secretly test with a box wine, her genuine modesty about calling herself an illustrator ("I like to draw... it was a hobby"), and the James Beard Award she won in the humor category for the media awards — standing out as an illustrator among writers.

The payoff is the full-circle reveal. Forrest plays a mystery voice, and Maryse immediately identifies Master Sommelier Ian Cauble. It turns out her whole project traces back to him. While studying for her certified sommelier exam and clicking around Instagram, she was struck by how visually evocative — and delightfully silly — wine language can be. Coming to wine a little later herself and not always feeling like she fit in with the somm crowd, she found her own way to contribute. And Ian's iconic line — that a wine tastes like fresh cut garden hose — was so perfect it named the whole thing.

A fitting finale for the Wine-Curious: proof that the most memorable wine language comes from having fun with it.

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In Part 1, Keith laughs through a surprise call to a bed-and-breakfast in his hometown of Caboolture, Australia (where the locals are more sure about the Crocodile Hunter than the future superstar), talks about flying his mum and dad over for the CMAs, and admits the Aussie beers he still misses back in the States. He opens up about the Farmhand drought-relief broadcast beamed to Australia via satellite, his love of Farm Aid and Willie Nelson, and where his best song ideas tend to strike — the shower. Plus a caller phones in about the Somebody Like You video with Niki Taylor. A warm, funny, genuine snapshot of Keith Urban on the rise.

Show notes (timestamped highlights)

• The montage intro and the "urban legend" welcome
• The surprise call home to Caboolture — and Gloria's Crocodile Hunter mix-up
• Bringing mum and dad over for the CMAs
• The Aussie beers Keith misses: VB and Coopers (and a shot at Fosters)
• Anaheim House of Blues and the Farmhand drought-relief satellite broadcast
• Farm Aid, Willie Nelson, and why helping farmers touches everyone
• Songwriting in the shower — and the "wet trail to the tape deck"
• A caller rings in about the Somebody Like You video with Niki Taylor

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What started as a workaround for the cocktail licensing gap has evolved into something much bigger. Premium Blend's Agave Wine Collection isn't just a tequila substitute anymore — California restaurants are doing bottle service with it, customers are taking shots, and people are drinking it straight because at 48 proof, it's smoother with none of the burn.

In this episode, Gino Santos walks Forrest through:

• The philosophy behind product development — Gino won't sell something he doesn't believe in himself
• The full Agave Wine Collection lineup: Tequesta and Ginete (blanco-style), Guitarron (reposado-style), Guitarron Classico, Zapotec (mezcal-style), and El Guitarron Cristalino
• Why the products are made from 100% blue agave sourced in Jalisco, Mexico — the same region as the world's finest tequilas
• The evolution from masking the product in cocktails to serving it straight — and why that shift matters
• How "wine snobs" remain a persistent challenge, and why the term "wine-based liquor" is a deliberate positioning decision
• What Gino's day actually looks like as president: strategic, legal, and financial vision — thinking about next year, not today
• A telling detail: Forrest signed up on the Premium Blend website and had samples at his door within 24 hours

The product has come a long way since the trade show days of convincing skeptics one sip at a time.

Learn more at premiumblend.com

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Maryse Chevriere a five-question, multiple-choice wine quiz, and her answers double as a myth-busting crash course.

Why do sommeliers have you taste before pouring the full glass? To check whether the wine is corked or flawed — and, honestly, to catch whether you simply don't like it. Maryse would rather figure that out early, pour the bottle by the glass, and steer you toward something you'll love than watch you pay for a bottle you'll never finish. And that returned bottle needn't go to waste: if it isn't faulty, let the staff taste it so they can sell it by the glass as a special. Everybody wins.

"Good legs"? It's about sugar and alcohol content — not quality, not price, and definitely not a Boston Marathon qualifying time. Maryse calls it a phrase you don't really need anymore, though it opens a lovely tangent about her dad, an old-school wine lover whose family hailed from Bordeaux and who was sure those were simply the best wines there were. As she learned the subject herself, she realized his confidence came from a narrow lens — but he enjoyed wine and had a good time, and sometimes that's its own kind of bliss.

Why swirl? To release the aromas — the contact with air wakes the wine up. She half-loves Forrest's alternate theory that you're summoning the flavor gods. On tasting technique, she suggests drawing in a little air like sipping through a mini cocktail straw (no gargling required) and letting the wine touch all points of your palate, since you taste different things in different places — without getting too fancy about it.

And sniffing the cork? Mostly theater. A cork smells like cork. If you want to know whether a wine is tainted, smell the wine in the glass, not the stopper — a lesson she picked up early in her training.

For the Wine-Curious listener, it's five minutes of permission to stop being intimidated by the rituals — and to understand what's worth doing and what's just for show.

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Sandwiches and cold milk. That's what greeted a five-year-old Gino Santos when the U.S. Coast Guard pulled his family off a sinking shrimp boat and brought them ashore in Key West. For a kid who had just spent the crossing crammed into a shrimp hold with his grandmother, it was heaven. That same resilience and hunger would define Gino's path decades later when he and his brother Henry built Premium Blend Cocktails from nothing. In this episode, Gino walks Forrest through:

• The harrowing details of the family's escape from Cuba — a stolen shrimp boat, Soviet-era communism, a Bay of Pigs connection, and a Coast Guard rescue
• His academic path through Stetson University and an MBA from the University of Miami
• How a sales job with Oscar Mayer led him to discover a wine-based spirit product that nobody was marketing correctly
• The origin of the Premium Blend partnership with his brother Henry, who was running a Colombian mining equipment company in Miami at the time
• The critical role of Florida Distillers and a mentor named Chris Mitchell, who took a chance on two unknown entrepreneurs with no industry experience
• Why education was Premium Blend's biggest early challenge — and how "getting the liquid to the lips" at trade shows and samplings changed everything

The wine-based cocktail space has exploded since the 90s, and Premium Blend was there at the beginning — grinding through skepticism one margarita at a time.

Learn more at premiumblend.com

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The best way to learn wine, Maryse Chevriere argues, isn't to read about it — it's to pour two glasses and taste the difference. In this episode she walks Forrest through the drinking games tucked into How to Sound Wine Smart, designed to make abstract concepts click through direct comparison. Think a wine you assumed was sweet suddenly revealing itself as dry when set beside an actually sweet one, a shy grape next to an aromatic Gewürztraminer, or one bottle tasted at first sip, again at thirty minutes, and again at two hours to feel what time and air really do. There are no winners, no losers, and no test — just an experience built to make the lesson stick and get people genuinely excited to drink wine.

Maryse also pulls back the curtain on making the book. Illustrating it took five or six months — most of them while she was pregnant — and proved trickier than expected. On Instagram, funny tasting notes hand her ready-made visual ideas; for the book she deliberately chose the generic, professional terms people actually use, which meant figuring out how to paint something as abstract as "rustic," "silky," or "leathery." Writing was its own slow burn, since she's a self-described fiddler who can't move on until a line sounds exactly right.

Asked for her home run, she points to the "character" chapter. Instead of the technical checklist of fruits, non-fruits, and "medium-plus" this-and-that she was trained in, she gives readers something more relatable: a wine that's friendly, that's giving golden retriever energy. It's a warmer, more human way in.

Forrest names the throughline — she's not dumbing wine down, she's making something genuinely complex feel approachable. This isn't soda off an assembly line; it's the product of an enormous amount of craft, and she wants more people to feel welcome to it. Maryse agrees, wondering aloud why wine intimidates people in a way that describing a restaurant dish or a piece of art simply doesn't. The stigma, she says, is what wine has had to work hardest to overcome — and helping people get past it is the whole point.

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Ever wonder why your favorite neighborhood restaurant doesn't serve cocktails? Chances are it comes down to one thing: the liquor license. In many states, a full liquor license can run well into six or seven figures on the open market — making it virtually impossible for small and mid-sized venues to offer a full bar program.

That's exactly the problem Gino Santos and his brother Henry set out to solve with Premium Blend Cocktails. Their wine-based spirits are legally classified as wine — meaning any venue with a basic beer and wine license (which in Florida costs around $400) can serve them. The result? Cocktail-style drinks, no liquor license required.

In this episode, Gino explains:

• Why liquor licenses are so expensive and hard to obtain
• How Premium Blend products are formulated to qualify legally as wine
• The difference between a liquor license and a beer-and-wine license — and why it matters for thousands of venues
• How his family escaped Cuba thanks to an uncle who literally stole a boat
• Growing up bilingual in Newark and Miami with a famous Cuban singer-songwriter father

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Some people are trained into wine. Maryse Chevriere talked her way in on pure enthusiasm — and it turned out to be the perfect qualification. In this episode she tells Forrest Kelly how a manager went to bat for her despite her being "green," echoing the philosophy her chef husband lives by: give him someone hungry to learn over someone he'd have to un-train.

From there, Maryse walks through the pivot that shaped her path — leaving New York not because she'd outgrown the wine bar, but because she was ready for a new experience and drawn to the easy access to wine country that San Francisco offered. She admits she wasn't overthinking the cross-country move in her late 20s, which she figures is exactly the right way to make big decisions: try it, and change course if it doesn't work.

The conversation lingers on a standout wine-country memory — a Napa producer pouring an unexpectedly aromatic Grignolino, a grape you rarely see, that felt gloriously out of type for the region — though her heart belongs to cooler-climate Sonoma Pinot.

Then Forrest turns to the main event: How to Sound Wine Smart. Maryse explains how her Instagram account revealed that wine's real barrier isn't the wine — it's the language. People freeze at the shop or restaurant, unsure what they're being sold, and just nod along. Most wine books bury terminology in a tiny glossary at the back; she wanted to flip that, building a fun, visual, genuinely useful resource that reads like a friend talking over a glass rather than a textbook. Forrest praises the book's approachable breakdowns — like how to actually taste a glass of wine — and Maryse sums up her whole mission in a sentence: make it easy to digest, and make it sound human.

For the Wine-Curious listener, this one's a permission slip: you don't need to be trained, and you don't need to fake it. You just need the right words.

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