Adrian Weckler

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Hello and you're welcome to The Big Tech Show with me, Adrian Weckler.

Now from selling Irish pubs in Italy to US multinationals in Ireland to co-founding a fintech startup here to now becoming a breakout international social media wine influencer.

I'm talking today to the talented Mr. Jonathan Staunton, also known on social media as Wine List Guy, who has been named the Wine Sommelier 2025 at the Vino Influencer Global Awards in Spain.

Jonathan, first of all, you're welcome to the podcast.

I'm going to get into the wine fluencer ring in a couple of minutes, but you've gone from being what is to us quite a conventional business person weaving in and out of tech marketing, you know, multinational startups, the kind of thing.

things that we cover and the kind of people that we regularly talk to, to being one of Ireland's sort of fastest growing and now European award winning wine influencers with tens of thousands of followers on social media, especially Instagram.

I'm going to be asking you how you have learned to make a business out of that and what brought you to it.

But first, I want you to take you back a

through what brought you to this point.

And your first experience in business had an interesting cultural route into it in that you left school and went to stay with your aunt and your communist city planner uncle, didn't you?

Yeah, because shortly after that, Irish pubs in Italy started to boom.

And I think you were telling me before that more pubs were starting to be built in Italy than McDonald's because of Italian 90s.

Social embassies.

That's a great term for it.

And you ended up living in Milan for a couple of years.

Incredible.