Full Pour magazine launched in 2023 with the goal of fully covering the drinks space: wine, beer, cocktails, infused beverages, and non-alcoholic. The magazine is the brainchild of founder, editor, and publisher Lauren Buzzeo.

At Full Pour, Buzzeo has created a physical magazine for the future. The magazine knows who its target audience is, leans into its print-first presence, and fully embraces social responsibility. The result looks and feels like a revelation.

Printed on high quality paper, Full Pour is a joy to hold. It is also a feast for the eyes, with striking original artwork and in-depth articles from some of the best writers in the space. Full Pour, which is published quarterly, uses non-toxic dyes and is printed on 100% post-consumer waste paper.

The magazine has already received its flowers. Full Pour was named Magazine Launch of the Year in 2023 by FOLIO: Eddie and Ozzie Awards. It was named the best cocktails and spirits publication in 2025 by Tales of the Cocktail Annual Spirited Awards. Buzzeo, meanwhile, was recognized for her work in 2024 by WineBusiness Monthly.

Prior to starting Full Pour, Buzzeo spent 16 years at Wine Enthusiast magazine. She worked her way up from tasting coordinator to executive editor before leaving and starting her own magazine. (Full disclosure: I worked under Lauren for almost my entire nine and a half years at Wine Enthusiast. I have written two articles for Full Pour.)

Here, Buzzeo talks about how she became interested in wine, how the pandemic influenced Full Pour coming to be, and who’s reading physical magazines these days. (Hint: It’s not who you think.) The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you first become interested in wine?

My father is Italian, my mother’s family is of various European descent, and wine was always a part of our gatherings and family tables. I was exposed to it in a responsible and more cultural-leaning way from a young age.

My dad used to do tastings with me of Chassagne-Montrachet versus Puligny-Montrachet and talk about the differences between them. This was when I was 13 or 14. So I was very fortunate to have that education, perspective, and appreciation given to me from a young age, some might say an inappropriate age.

In our family, wine was always more about this unique agricultural product that’s tied to a very specific place and growing conditions and people who make it with intention. It’s about the stories behind it. It was always, to me, a fascinating lens or perspective into different places, people, and creative products.

You spent 16 years at Wine Enthusiast, leaving as executive editor in 2022. What made you decide to change gears?

Like so many people during the pandemic, I started to have feelings like, what am I doing? What can I contribute differently to this world? What can I do better? How am I making the most of my time and my passion with this limited, finite time that we have on this world?

So I ended up resigning from Wine Enthusiast in April of 2022. Honestly, at the time, I did not have any dreams of starting a magazine. I left because I felt like it was time for me to give myself the space and grace to actually figure out what those next things were.

I also really wanted to spend some time with my kids. I felt like I was working a lot.

How did you get pulled back into the publishing world?

I went to South Africa in October of 2022 and attended their huge triennial wine show called Cape Wine. I had been to Cape Wine before, and I reviewed the wines of South Africa in my former life for many years.

This was the first show after the pandemic, so it was the first outing for a lot of people, not just myself. It allowed people to come back together and to remind ourselves what we do, why we love it, and why we’re here. Reconnecting with all of those people reignited a huge flame that this is where I’m meant to be.

How did the idea for Full Pour come about?

On the plane home from South Africa, I started to put together a proposal about creating a magazine that covers all of the things that we know, love, and enjoy today in the beverage space. It used to be a very segmented world in terms of drink preferences. There are caricatures of each type of beverage drinker, right? There was the quintessential wine lover, aka wine snob, and he had the monocle and the pinky out. There was the beer drinker, which was like a bro and an IPA, whatever.

But the reality is these worlds are all coming together and meshing. We’re all cross drinkers. I’ve called myself a cross drinker for many years. You can enjoy a fine wine, you can enjoy a beer, and you can enjoy a cocktail, and that’s okay.

Tell us about what’s in Full Pour.

At Full Pour, we’ve got articles about wine, beer, spirits, infused beverages, and non-alc. Those are the five categories.

I really wanted every issue to have coverage of all of these major categories of consumables. So every issue has at least one front-of-book story, which is a little bit shorter, and one feature length story that is a little bit longer on the five major categories we cover.

The physical package of the magazine is so distinctive in terms of the paper quality and cardstock. How did you decide on that?

I always appreciated what I’ll call more of the independent drinks publications and even extending into food. Publications like Noble Rot, Tonic, Whetstone, Pipette when that was coming out. There was a really cool indie and meatier feel to those magazines. They weren’t floppy. They weren’t necessarily on all the newsstands, but they were very specific to who they were speaking to and what they wanted to cover. They also gave you a real story. I wanted to try to emulate that.

So I knew that I wanted thicker card stock. I didn’t want anything flimsy or floppy. I didn’t want like a flip through in the bathroom for 20 minutes and then chuck it having read nothing type of vibe. I wanted something beautiful to sit on your coffee table, and that included the look of it in addition to the feel, the content, and the stories having a bit more substance.

The cover art is always so striking and beautiful.

The look of it was very important to me. For the cover, I never wanted to do photography and just the boring, staid, static shots of bottles or people or whatever. I really, again, wanted to lean into that passion and that creativity that fuels this industry and artists.

I definitely wanted to work with original artists to both do the cover as well as some internal art, and to have it be more fun, accessible, approachable, and beautiful – really just a thrill for the eyes. Something to fully escape in all the beauty instead of staring at a screen.

We work with a different artist for every issue. It’s really a free-for-all in terms of the possibilities, which is exciting to me. I never approach or talk to artists or commission them with “This is specifically what I want.” It’s very much a free and open conversation of what they visualize, and I let them run with it.

Full Pour is notable as a modern magazine in terms of its green bona fides. How did that come to be?

In line with those questions over the pandemic, “What are we doing? What are we contributing? What can we do better?” I wanted to try to do better in terms of publishing and environmental sustainability with magazine printing.

Our paper is 100% post-consumer waste, recycled paper. The paper is not bleached, which people don’t know necessarily just how many chemicals go into the processing of paper, bleach being a huge one. So it’s not bleached. The inks and the toners that we use are natural or vegetable-based, so they’re not chemical-based.

All of that makes the final product fully recyclable. There are no laminates on the cover. There are no treatments that will muck up recycling plants. Again, a lot of publications are printed with either materials or additional chemical components that actually prevent them from being fully recyclable and/or damage recycling plant equipment.

The bag that the magazine is shipped in is even compostable, correct?

Correct. For shipping, I definitely didn’t want to use plastic bags because they’re not biodegradable or curbside recyclable. So I found these fantastic corn-based mailers that are fully compostable and biodeg

radable. It’s not the cheapest material, but at the end of the day, I thought it was important to align with the purpose and the mission behind the magazine and to use materials responsibly.

We also have a fully recyclable mailing label because the glue that is on mailing labels is not always recyclable. I really did everything I could to make it as responsible and responsibly sourced as possible.

Full Pour had its first issue in the spring of 2023. What’s it been like launching a print magazine in today’s world, where everything is crunching toward digital?

We are a print-first publication. We do put a few of our articles on-line so people can have a taste of the type of content that we love to publish, but we do not reproduce the magazine in its entirety.

Certainly the pandemic exacerbated everything going into digital and digital only. I think, as a result of that, we did see some pushback to all of that digital reliance.

I think that people now have come back to a point where there is an appreciation, beauty, and a different level of value to a physical product. It is an opportunity for you to carve out time away from the constant distraction of the online world. There’s no notifications. There’s no blue screen light there. It’s a reason to have time to yourself and to really escape the world for a moment, to enjoy something without all of the constant noise around you.

What are you seeing in terms of who is interested in physical products right now?

What’s interesting is that a lot of people tend to assume that it’s an older generation that prefers a print product and that might be sustaining businesses such as mine that are devoted to that medium. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

The reality is it’s the younger generation that’s actually most interested and most fervently buying and supporting physical products. Think about it — if you never had the experience of pre-digital tangible goods, wouldn’t you be curious what that could be and feel like? What enjoyment of some of the amazing and creative things in life — music, art, books, film, and so on — would be like if you were allowed to actually, fully immerse yourself in them without constant interruption or distraction? No pop-ups, no DMs, no commercials, no new notifications or posts from friends, just you and this thing to get completely lost in.

With print, people can afford themselves that opportunity to enjoy something without the constant noise, to really dive into and appreciate it to its fullest in their senses and hearts. And that’s what we want to deliver — a meaningful, moving, empowering, and transportive human experience with every issue.

Images courtesy of Full Pour. Read more about Full Pour here.

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