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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