About Us

California Wine Country with Steve Jaxon & Dan Berger is a live, weekly radio show and podcast all about the business, science and pleasure of wine.

Our motto is, “We taste, we laugh, we learn.”

Our guests are the most interesting and influential winemakers in the business, who bring in their favorite wines for tasting. There are always interesting stories about each wine and each guest and the show has a relaxed, down-to-earth atmosphere.

California Wine Country is produced in Santa Rosa, California, in the heart of Sonoma County wine country. Our location gives us access to guests from the numerous nearby wineries. The show is produced live on Friday afternoons at 5pm as part of The Drive with Steve Jaxon, now heard on Wine Country Radio 95.5 FM (Mon.-Fri. 3-6pm).

Steve Jaxon

As the host of The Drive with Steve Jaxon, Mon-Fri 3-6 pm on Wine Country Radio 95.5 FM, Steve Jaxon is a proven ratings leader and a superstar in Sonoma County. Whether he is interviewing an old friend or a new acquaintance, Steve Jaxon always makes his guests feel at ease and reveal the essential parts of their work and their success.

California Wine Country is recorded live on Fridays from 5:00 to 6:00 pm during The Drive on Wine Country Radio 95.5. Given the show’s location in the heart of wine country, Steve is able to interview a roster of guests that is second to none. Steve is also President of Vicario Productions, which produces The Drive, California Wine Country and other shows.

Dan Berger

California Wine Country co-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.

Tom Simoneau

Tom has been a frequent California Wine Country guest and presented his Wines of the Year on the radio and the podcast from 2017 to 2022.  Simoneau Vineyards lies on 12½ acres on the western side of Alexander Valley, just outside of Healdsburg, California, in Sonoma County, which he and his wife Brenda Lee bought in 1988. Today the Simoneau portfolio includes the Brenda Lee Chardonnay, a Chardonnay Rosé, a Bordeaux blend called FenceLine, and a Cabernet Sauvignon. He retired from CWC after the 2022 WOY show.

Barry Herbst

Barry Herbst is also a frequent guest on California Wine Country. He is the wine buyer at Bottle Barn, our on-air radio sponsor. In that capacity he is responsible for the selection in one of the biggest and busiest fine wine retailers in all of wine country. His thirty years of experience in the wine world began in LA’s most celebrated restaurants, including Chinois on Main and Osteria Angelini. Later, Barry was General Manager of the Rare Wine Company in Sonoma and worked with Soutirage and Bounty Hunter Rare Wine & Spirits in Napa Valley. He is also serves as a judge in many renowned wine competitions.

 

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A Note about the Red Cross:

In the Fall of 2017 Sonoma County suffered some of the most destructive wildfires ever seen in California. Then in March of 2019, flooding caused extensive damage and displacement. In the Fall of 2019, fire struck again. Each time, the Red Cross was on the scene and gave tremendous assistance to people. Please consider making a donation to the Red Cross. You may go to the Red Cross website, www.redcross.org and click “Donate” or follow this link to the Red Cross website’s secure Donation page.

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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 three sizes: The logo above left is 288×288 pixels. The next one is 1080×1080 pixels. Both of these are web resolution, 72 px/in.  The last one is 2400×2400 px at 150 px/in., 16″ x 16″ finished size. This larger, higher resolution file is for a poster-size print or other use. The illustration of the logo over the vineyard picture is also at web resolution. Contact us if you would like to use the high res file. Please do not alter the logo in any way. NB: the full logo includes the names of some wine regions, while the small logo omits that portion of the design.