About Us

California Wine Country is a live, weekly radio show and podcast all about the business, science and pleasure of wine. It is recorded live on the radio Friday afternoons at 5pm on The Drive. Our guests are the most interesting and accomplished people in the wine business who come to share their work and their stories.

Each podcast episode has its own web page, which remains available permanently here on the CWC website. The right sidebar lists Podcast Episodes, all the way back to the first episode recorded on March 15, 2017. These episode pages provide unique advantages for guests and for audiences. The individual episode pages are carefully curated for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so that they will rank high in Google search results when people search for the guests’ brands or names. 

Promotion: There are daily topical promos on The Drive that mention the sponsor, to remind listeners of the weekly show on Fridays. The hosts also promote the podcast during the live show.

Audiences are encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on a podcast app to get every episode on their phone or other devices. Whether people find this podcast here at its own website, at the station’s website or on popular podcast platforms, ultimately most of the regular ongoing listening will happen in the subscriber’s podcast app. 

Guests and sponsors can easily republish the audio player of an episode anywhere in their own media. The guests may use their episode to promote themselves and their brands. (See suggestions, below.) They can put links to it in any and all of their outbound advertising, for their audience to easily visit the podcast. 

The Drive

The Drive on Wine Country Radio is on the air Monday through Friday from 3:00 – 6:00 PM on Wine Country Radio 95.5 FM . It is Sonoma County’s favorite radio show, with a roster of guests that includes local leaders, journalists and reporters, public officials, actors and directors, librarians, therapists, comedians, musicians and more. The show is #1 in its time slot with a stadium full of daily listeners.

California Wine Country with Dan Berger and Brew Ha Ha with Herlinda Heras are among the weekly featured segments on The Drive, along with others such as, Theater Thursday with Harry Duke, The Dining Car with Clark Wolf and The Blotter with SRPD Sgt. Patti Steffens.

Dan Berger

California Wine Country host Dan Berger is known around the world as a wine judge and journalist. Dan started making dry Riesling with his own Bahl Fratty label, in 2024. He was the LA Times wine columnist from 1988 to 1996 and in the heyday of newspapers his wine column was published in over 100 papers nationwide. He has also written and published four books on wine. Steve Jaxon’s nicknames for Dan are “The Laydown King” and Dan “Lay-It-Down” Berger, because of Dan’s preference for good aging and for the enormity of his personal cellar.

Dan is also a well-known wine judge, who judges for competitions all around the country as well as in his own annual competition. He began his career as a journalist covering sports and compares that to covering wine, where in both fields, there are new competitions and new products coming out every year. Dan writes a weekly column on wine for The Press Democrat in Sonoma County and his subscription newsletter, Vintage Experiences, has been published weekly for almost 20 years.

Daedalus Howell

Daedalus Howell traverses literature, film, journalism, broadcast, and conceptual art with a singular blend of wit and cultural inquiry. Since Steve Jaxon’s retirement in August of 2025, he has been the host of The Drive, 3-6 PM weekdays, on Wine Country Radio 95.5 FM.

Based in Petaluma, California, Howell has built a multifaceted body of work that interrogates the myths of media and identity through a heady mix of humor and self-reflection.

He is also the editor of a portfolio of local newspapers, including the North Bay Bohemian, the Healdsburg Tribune and the Pacific Sun.

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Promotion Tips for Guests

Our guests are the leading vineyard owners and growers, label owners, winemakers and wine promoters, experts and judges in the business. We invite all of our guests to promote their appearance on California Wine Country to their audiences. For example, websites, emails, social media, signage and anything similar are good places for the news.

Share the news with your personal network. Your friends and colleagues will be keen to hear your episode.

Announce your episode to your Social Media audience. Send a link to your episode page on the CWC site, with an invitation to subscribe to the podcast.

Email promotion: If you send regular emails to a subscriber list, announce your episode there too, with links to your episode page on the CWC site and/or to your website.

Embedding the Audio Player

EMBED THE AUDIO PLAYER OF YOUR EPISODE ON YOUR WEBSITE. Create a page on your website about your CWC episode and share the audio player right there on the page. Put the audio player on a high-traffic page. Good options are your home page, a dedicated blog post, or any page that will get high traffic. Here are the 2 easy steps to embed your episode on your website:

(1) Put a Link to your CWC Episode Page on your Website. Copy the URL of your episode’s page and put it on a page your website. That will help your visitors find the episode and it also helps us with our page rankings.

(2) Embed the Audio Player of your Episode on your Website. To embed the audio player of your episode onto any page of your website, find your page and click on the “Embed” link under the audio player. It will display some code; copy all of it and paste it into your web page. This is an easy task for your web editor. Please contact us if you have questions or need assistance.

Use the CWC Logo

Guests may download the California Wine Country show logos from this page and use them anywhere in their promotional editorial. Here is the CWC logo file in different sizes. Please do not alter the logo in any way.