listen and see
who
Jon Rimmerman built Garagiste into the world's largest email-based wine business by ignoring everything the industry told him to do.
The New York Times calls him, "a conduit of culture."
GQ describes him as “the man who blew up the whole wine world.”
MAVERICK
No website for the first 14 years.
No advertising, ever.
Just daily stories sent to his 400,000+ strong community linking them to products outside of established distribution systems
EXPLORER
Turkish back roads
Sicilian volcanoes
Seattle basements where EPA scientists make Dolcetto after hours
Always on the road, Jon discovers producers making wine in warehouses, and abandoned vineyards, harvesting pine sap resin in the Pyrenees, and picking pepper corns in Nepal
CONNECtor
DAILY STORIES
Concrete, sensory, connection to let readers feel and see the invisible web of people, place and process
BUILDER
What Rimmerman built with wine took thirty years and a network of makers and believers
arms around the world is the next step forward
what
Everything is connected: food wine and music, one thread.
Shelf Life
We all expire — what will you do until then?
Adventures and conversations about the wild ecosystems of food, music, art, culture and love — and the fragile webs of relationship that keep them alive.
Nobody notices until the tomatoes taste different. And then nobody remembers what they tasted like before.
Shelf Life is a living exposé, an in-the-field document. Each episode follows Jon Rimmerman — a 30 year finder of irreplaceable things — into the places where these ecosystems intersect and breathe. These places are both rare and everywhere. This show offers a lens through which to witness, recognize, and participate in their existence.
A recognition, not an introduction.
The guests Jon wants to meet are people for whom place, process, and cultural ecosystem are not incidental — they’re the whole story. This is the conversation where a musician, artist, chef or producer gets to talk about the thing they never get asked about in interviews — the obsession, the detour, the passion that looks unrelated until it turns out to be the thread running through everything.
In the vineyards of Burgundy and Napa and Walla Walla. In wheat fields in remote corners of Italy. In the salt flats of the Algarve, Brittany and Croatia. In small jars of honey that taste like a specific hillside on a specific afternoon. In record shops and radio stations and rooms where someone is doing something that quietly (persistently) changes how everything around them behaves.
- Long-form conversation + field footage
- No desk. No backdrop. Filmed in the guest's own territory.
- Non-promotional. No product placement. Full editorial independence.
The Garagiste audience — 400,000+ sophisticated tastemakers at the intersection of music, food, and wine — understands that supporting people who craft with attention and respect is what keeps the energy and beauty of our world alive. They are already waiting to meet the guests we bring into this room.
Jon Rimmerman has spent thirty years in pursuit of what he calls vinous truth — the honest expression of a place, a practice, and the specific people who make something real possible. As founder of Garagiste, he built an audience of almost 500,000 subscribers not by selling wine but by finding it: in basements, on back roads, at the end of fences he probably shouldn't have crossed. The conviction that drove all of it — that what ends up in the glass is inseparable from the relationships behind it — doesn't stop at wine. It never did. Shelf Life is what happens when that same instinct follows the thread into music, food, art, and culture.
Jon Rimmerman's debut album treats sonic curation the way great wine lists treat terroir—with obsessive care for place, people and process.
The same instinct that made Rimmerman a cult phenomenon in wine now layers guitar interplay, Rickenbacker jangle, and melodic hooks that one UK A&R veteran described as "Kings of Leon having a spot of tea with Cheap Trick."
The result is a point of view that took decades to form — shaped by writing, tasting, listening, and connecting dots across wine, food, and culture. It arrives fully built.
“Creativity and passion sit at the core of who Jon Rimmerman is”
“Jon Rimmerman seems to have emerged fully formed out of nowhere.”
The album premiered exclusively in Magnet Magazine in January 2026, recorded with Grammy-nominated producer Elliott Lanam at Hidden City Studios in Santa Barbara. Since then: a #16 peak on the NACC Sub-Modern Albums chart and #21 Most Added nationally across a 42-station college radio campaign, with breakout single "Dust" crossing into commercial specialty programming.
On YouTube — where the audience lives — the channel has grown to over 87,000 subscribers and 3 million views, up 70% in 90 days. Chartmetric ranks the project Top 2% globally, up 66,000 positions in the past 30 days.
why
Thirty years of traveling half the year teaches you one thing: nothing exists in isolation. Not a wine. Not a song. Not a city block. Pull on any thread and the whole web moves.
BRAND IDENTITY
The network is the narrative.
For thirty years, Rimmerman built Garagiste around a single conviction: that what ends up in the glass is inseparable from the relationships behind it—the land, the process, and the people who make things with attention.
arms around the world is here to say that The Living web of relationships that produces a great bottle produces a great loaf of bread, a great record, a great cup of coffee. What makes a place worth living in is directly connected the density & health of its intersecting webs.
Come along and taste it.
ELEMENTS
Universe: Terroir expanded beyond wine to include music, food, urban culture, creative communities
Jon Rimmerman, cultural explorer
Characteristics: Explorer (curious, reveals networks, resisting commodification) / Translator (revealing everyday food. wine and music as a primary means of connection and meaning)
Plot: Discovery → transformation through active engagement
Tone: Curious, sensory, grounded, connective
Visual language: Cinematic; plays with figure/ground, positive/negative space, scale; optical illusions; maps + network diagrams
Audience role: Co-creators, and participants
PERSONALITY
Curious (explores without predetermined answers)
Sensory (concrete, tactile, specific)
Direct (close, never at arm's length)
Cinematic (wide frame, specific detail, visual in texture)
Grounded (clear-eyed about how things work)
Connective (reveals relationships and invisible infrastructure)
Participatory (inviting, seeking to engage)
VOICE
Concrete sensory detail over abstract concepts
The overturned wastebasket hi-hat
The 1964 Super Reverb amp
Turkish back roads, Sicilian volcanoes; EPA scientists
Process, places, and creators as characters
PRINCIPLES
Context shapes content
let 10,000 flowers bloom in their own ecosystems
Everything is connected—wine, food, music, one thread
sensory experiences: listen and see
Creativity, craft, and attention are the connective tissue of community
WE ARE NOT
Nostalgic
Exclusive (we demystify, we invite in)
Transactional
Cynical
Loud
Generic
Precious
Slick
Exclusive
how
Everything here is built to travel. Album art, merch, visual identity, and direct links to the press kit and playlist — assets for partners, press, and collaborators working with arms around the world.
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album front cover
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album back cover
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single release art
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single release art
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single release art
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single release art
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vinyl album
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rocker t-shirt
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corduroy trucker hat
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cd and packaging
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tile t-shirt
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beanie
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cassette
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chop tank top
MOOD BOARD
VISUAL IDENTITY (snapshot)
stacked typemark, white
chop, white
horizontal typemark, white
