Tony Mascarpony’s Wine & Cheese Show

Most days, I’m on a tractor listening to music far louder than I probably should. House tracks spill out across the rows of old vines, sometimes to an audience of wild boar, sometimes just to me. Somewhere between pruning and bottling, the idea took hold that amongst all of the noise, the stress and the rhythm of the seasons, there was a soundtrack worth sharing.

That’s how Tony Mascarpony’s Wine & Cheese Show came to life.

Tony Mascarpony is my 90s DJ alter ego, gently resurrected after years in hibernation. Before I was farming organic vines in the Languedoc with my partner Harriet, I dabbled as a DJ. Not famous, just obsessed. When we moved to France to make wine, that part of me didn’t disappear, it just got quieter, buried under harvests, young kids, bookkeeping, and the practical realities of running a small family vineyard.

Then one summer, between long days in the vines and late nights rediscovering old records, Tony was reimagined.

Diaries from the Vineyard

The Wine & Cheese Show is a monthly vineyard radio project; part DJ set, part audio diary. Each episode blends a curated mix of music with short, honest reflections from life at Domaine Zig Zag: harvest highs, business lows, tipped tractors, bottling stress, and the quieter moments that make rural France feel like home. It’s deliberately unpolished. I wanted it to sound like a conversation with friends.

My partner Harriet appears regularly, adding humour, and the occasional reality check. Her commentary keeps the whole thing grounded. We’re not romanticising vineyard life; we’re living it. Learning French on the fly, raising kids among the vines, figuring things out as we go. The show reflects that messiness.

Each season has its own mood, and each mood has a soundtrack. Sometimes the music is serene, echoing quiet mornings in the vines. Sometimes it’s frenetic, matching the chaos of harvest or bottling weeks. Like the wine, it’s low-intervention storytelling, recorded as life happens.

Wine, Music, and Mood

Music, like wine, carries memory, place, and emotion. A good record stays with you. A good wine does the same. That parallel is at the heart of the project.

I don’t separate the work in the vineyard from the work behind the microphone. Long tractor days shape the sets. Bottling days influence the tone. Even the silences matter. The result is something that sits between radio show, memoir, and collaborative mixtape, with listeners occasionally sending in tracks of their own.

Vineyard Radio

In a world of slick content and instant takes, I hope my vineyard radio feels almost defiant. It’s slow. Seasonal. Human. Episodes come monthly, shaped by what’s happening in the vines and in our lives. Nothing is cleaned up too much.

I like to think of the Wine & Cheese Show the same way I think about our wines: expressive and very much of a place. Low-intervention wine. High-rotation records. Stories poured by the glass.

If you hear a touch of cheese in there, that’s intentional. It’s part of the flavour and we hope hope you love it.

We’re up to Episode 8: Cardiac which is filled with pangs of the heart (the good kind and the one’s when you wonder if you’re having a heart attack)

For all episodes go to Tony Mascarpony on the Domaine Zig Zag site.