California Wine Country with Dan Berger & Daedalus Howell is a live, weekly radio show and podcast all about the business, science and pleasure of wine. The show is produced live on Friday afternoons at 5pm as part of The Drive on Wine Country Radio 95.5 FM (Mon.-Fri. 3-6pm).
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.
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.
Daedalus Howell
Daedalus Howell traverses literature, film, journalism, broadcast, and conceptual art with a singular blend of wit and cultural inquiry. Since August 20, 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 and the Pacific Sun.
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.
1400×1400 px @ 144 px/in. (larger & higher resolution).