On December 12, 1964, WINE
signed on the air. Originally it was a
daytimer, required to go off the air at sunset. It was
simulcast with co-owned FM station 95.1 WGHF, which had gone on the air in 1957. Later, the FM station began using the same
call sign as the AM station, WINE-FM. In the 1970s and early 1980s, WINE-AM-FM were
Top 40 stations. When the AM had to go off the air, WINE-FM continued playing the Top 40 hits at night. By the 1980s, WINE became a
full-service,
adult contemporary station, while the FM station became
album rock outlet
WRKI. In the 1990s, WINE became part of an
all-news network that included
WNLK (1350 AM) in
Norwalk, Connecticut. Both became
news/talk a few years later. After being sold to
Cumulus Media, WINE spent a few years as an
adult standards station, along with now-defunct
sister station WPUT (1510 AM) in
Brewster, New York. Both WINE and WPUT switched to an
all sports format. At first, it was part of
ESPN Radio. They switched to
CBS Sports Radio on January 2, 2013. WINE's nighttime signal is very weak at 4 watts. WPUT operated daytime only. WINE's longtime competitor is
WLAD in Danbury, now a
talk radio station. In addition to WRKI, WINE had a second FM sister station, Patterson, New York's
WDBY, which has a booster station in Danbury. On August 30, 2013, a deal was announced in which
Townsquare Media would acquire 53 Cumulus stations, including WINE, for $238 million. The deal was part of Cumulus' acquisition of
Dial Global; Townsquare and Dial Global were both controlled by
Oaktree Capital Management. The sale to Townsquare was completed on November 14, 2013. The station lost its CBS Sports Radio affiliation in June 2021, and for several weeks, went
dark, before returning with a simulcast of WRKI to retain the license. In January 2023, WINE went silent. That July, Townsquare agreed to sell the station to the
International Church of the Grace of God for $150,000; WINE immediately joined its
Nossa Rádio network, also heard on
WBIX in
Boston and
WFLL in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, under a
local marketing agreement. The sale was consummated on December 12, 2023. ==References==