by Suzanne Daub
When a Certified Sommelier and award-winning filmmaker travels to Chile by Cessna, ATV, and horseback to reach vineyards most of the wine world has never heard of — and one of them gets named the best winery on the planet — people start to pay attention.
Jack Kauffman is not easy to categorize, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Born in Illinois and raised in Connecticut, the filmmaker and Certified Sommelier has spent more than a decade deliberately resisting the neat boxes that the wine world and the film world each try to press people into — working harvests in Andalucia and Colchagua, running a wine bar in Charleston, selling rare bottles at Sotheby’s, earning WSET Level 3 with Merit, studying in Aix-en-Provence, building the east coast arm of a Napa Valley winery, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, quietly developing one of the most ambitious wine docu-series in recent memory.
The result is Uncorked Potential: Chile — a visually stunning, emotionally resonant documentary that premiered on CT Public TV on December 29, 2025, and is now available nationwide on PBS.org. The film explores the hidden, off-the-grid wine regions of Chile, a country that Kauffman believes is one of the most extraordinary — and most underappreciated — wine territories on Earth. With one of the wineries featured in the film having since been named the best winery in the world, that argument is growing harder to dispute.
“It was waiting for the right everything,” Jack explained. “Winemaker Cristian Vallejo helped open my eyes to the depths of Chilean wine, Film Producer Chris Walker helped put words into action, nearly a decade of working in various roles in wine gave me great confidence — and so many more things that brought it all together.”
Kauffman’s story doesn’t begin in a cellar or on a film set. It begins on the water. In 2010, at the age of sixteen, he took his first official job as a sailing instructor at Nantucket Community Sailing — a gig he returned to every summer through 2014, racing Lasers in the Nantucket Race Week and helping crew the 12 Metre Northern Light to victory. The island left a mark on more than his sailing record. That first summer on Nantucket, he walked into NCTV and asked if he could get involved in anything they were producing. He wound up shooting live events, weddings, and commercial work all over the island — from The Wauwinet to the Galley Beach — and a filmmaker was born.
The earliest iteration of Uncorked Potential came in 2017, a documentary about the Finger Lakes wine region of upstate New York that Kauffman produced in 2016. It announced his dual ambitions plainly. But the film side of him then gave way, as he put it, to the wine side of him — years of harvests, certifications, auction floors, and wine bars that built the knowledge and confidence the project would eventually require.
The catalyst came in 2024 when Cristian Vallejo, head winemaker at Viña VIK in Chile, invited Kauffman to assist with the harvest as a junior winemaker. Kauffman recognized it immediately for what it was: not just a harvest, but a door. He reached out to close friend and executive producer Chris Walker, whose encouragement was, as Kauffman described it, “so great I knew I had to give it a shot.” Six months of pre-production planning followed, and then — in March and April of 2025 — production began in earnest.
What the crew captured over those weeks is extraordinary by any measure. The film visits producers across Chile’s most remote and geographically dramatic wine territories: a Carignan vineyard at the world’s highest elevation for that grape, reached by 4×4 trucks up mountain roads with a drinking-water stop at a mountain stream; fog-shrouded coastal vines where the cold Humboldt Current breathes life and tension into the grapes; and a winery tucked inside an ancient oak forest in the Millahue Valley, accessible only after forty minutes of painstaking off-road driving through terrain that Kauffman calls “mystical.”
The journey itself — Cessna, ATV, horseback — was not born purely of necessity. These were, Kauffman said, deliberate creative choices made to underscore that the story of Chilean wine is inseparable from the story of the land it grows in. “I want this show to be more than just an analysis of wine,” he explained, “to go beyond the minutiae, and inspire viewers with the adventures to be had beyond the well-trodden path.”
Kauffman wore every hat on the production — director, host, producer, editor — a decision that made for efficient creative communication but, by his own admission, exhausting days of moving constantly from behind the camera to in front of it. A stellar crew made it bearable: Assistant Director Chepo Porte, Production Managers Joel Kampfe and Jacob Setzko, camera operators Max Nadjar and Juan Pablo Farías, sound recordist Rafael Huerta, production assistant Alejandro Fuenzalida, and driver Gino Garrido.
Behind the host standing in those vineyards is a genuinely formidable wine résumé — one that gives Kauffman’s analysis on screen a credibility that a pure filmmaker could not bring and a visual sensibility that a pure sommelier would struggle to match.
That wine career was, it turns out, in some ways more aligned with the values of the Chilean producers he would eventually profile than it might appear. The Napa winery he helped build focused on minimal intervention and biodynamic practices, keeping production below 10,000 cases annually with experimental bottles priced accessibly. Many of Chile’s best small producers, Kauffman observed, follow similar principles. “Small production and minimal intervention,” he said. “You’d have to look to my time working in wine auctions to see my experience with prestigious, high value wines.”
The film has been received with notable enthusiasm since its premiere. Beyond its PBS and CT Public TV broadcast — with additional airings running through spring 2026 — Uncorked Potential: Chile has earned film festival recognition, a sold-out presentation at the New York Yacht Club, coverage in Wine Spectator and Wine Industry Advisor, features by Marca Chile and the Dutch publication Wijnplein, and a premiere event in New York City covered by the Chilean financial press. Live events hosting talks and wine dinners have followed, with more planned. And the film has just recently been nominated for a regional emmy in the New England Regional Emmys in the documentary category!
The title Uncorked Potential carries a double meaning Kauffman embraces openly. “It is, perhaps, as much about my potential as a filmmaker as it is about the wines of Chile,” he said. “I put all my energy and effort into making this film, to not only do the best I could to tell the exciting story of Chilean wines in an engaging way, but also to demonstrate my capabilities as a filmmaker, with the hopes that the world will want me to produce more content like this.”
With the docu-series format established and the world map wide open, the list of regions Kauffman wants to explore next reads like the most intriguing wine itinerary imaginable.
As for what he hopes viewers take away from this first Chilean chapter: “I certainly hope they’ve learned something, but more importantly, I hope they felt something. I want this show to inspire viewers to take a deeper look at wine and the world as a whole, and perhaps get out and explore it themselves.
Follow Jack Kauffman and his projects at Uncorkedpotentialwine.com and @uncorked_potential