I Teach Therefore I Am! (Regrettably I Am In New Jersey)

Mark Twain reportedly once quipped, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” For regular readers of WineSnark I’d like to say that despite my long absence from these pages I am not dead, I’m just living in New Jersey.

And when the Grim Reaper finally does come calling , I hope to go out in a trance-like stupor, just like my readers.

Not long ago I told my wife that when my time finally does come, I want to go out like Willard Motley who famously said, “Die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.”

She said, “Too late.”

I haven’t had time to write for this blog because I have a job, and part of that job is to teach people about wine. Maybe that’s why, despite my absenteeism, WineSnark readership continues to grow. I send my students to this website because I have a profound compassion for great wine, gourmet food, and driving internet-ranking algorithms.

I love the teaching process despite having spent most of my high school career avoiding the classroom. Instead I could usually be found beneath the stadium bleachers holding classes of my own. My freshman year I taught, “Ripple 101; Who Needs Grapes?”. My curriculum progressed to “Liebfraumilch; Is It Skim or Whole?” and culminated with, “Why Are They Called Cordials When They Make Me Hostile?”

To those students who took the time out of their busy schedules to seek out WineSnark.com in hopes of expanding their education I say, “I’m sorry!” … no wait, I mean, “Welcome”. WineSnark is arranged like the book I’ll never get around to finishing. Chapters are on the right, beneath a slew of icons for awards that I’ve been nominated for … honorably mentioned … a runner up to … and shortlisted on … but only occasionally won. Coming in second place time after time could have gotten me down. I might have chosen to live in the past, a broken, pathetic loser. But no! I chose to pull myself up and live in the present as a broken, pathetic loser.

Just a couple of months after my very first post I became a Wine Blog Award finalist for “Best New Wine Blog”. Of course I didn’t win, which convinced me the WBA organizers actually know what they’re doing. In all I was a finalist for four WBA Awards including “Best Overall Wine Blog”, “Wine Post of the Year”, and even one for “Best Writing”. I was surprised I didn’t win that one after turning out such literary gems as, “This Chardonnay is as bold and showy as a Jersey girl’s tramp stamp and has probably seen just as much wood.”

Go figure.

The awards icons are links to the relevant articles and I should point out that the ones that actually won or got published are about my wayward youth and have nothing to do with wine. There’s some interesting stuff here about hitchhiking around the country and getting pulled into a presidential assassination investigation but I would skip these if, like my family, you’re only visiting for the wine.

There’s a category called “Most Popular Posts” if you’re the kind of person who licks the icing off the cupcake and throws away the rest. The “Drinks Diary” category is for non-book articles. These stray from the educational plan that starts with “Introduction” and ends nineteen chapters later with “The Last Drop”. The chapters in between explore and explain where wine flavor originates, how we perceive it, and how to analyze and describe wine like a pro. Who knows, maybe you too can become a colossal party bore just like James Suckling, Robert Parker and me, except you’ll probably bathe more often. It’s reported that when I posted the writing tips chapter, somewhere in Illinois an English teacher turned over in her grave.

Chapter eight explores my struggle to decipher the illusive taste of umami. The 1907 discovery of umami led to the development of monosodium glutamate (MSG) as a flavor enhancer. Now I could feed you lots of material about MSG but you know you would just be hungry for more in an hour.

Chapter nine is an involved exploration of food and wine pairing that is based on some extensive research in the laboratory, and by laboratory I mean a fork and a glass. An undertaking of this magnitude required a research team of dedicated, compassionate wine professionals, or as they’re known in the trade, drunks.

More in depth exploration of the origin of flavor can be found in the chapters on terroir, fermentation and oak. Here I delve into the scientific foundation of wine flavor but I keep it simple and don’t even use a periodic table, except when I need a place to set my glass.

So thank you for visiting and don’t be afraid to leave a comment or two. Like the survey I had you fill out after class, I throw away the bad ones so the boss can’t read them.

I don’t know when I’ll have time to return to these august pages but rest assured that I think about WineSnark on a regular basis – like every time the web-hosting invoice arrives. And also know that I am still alive and well, and while living in New Jersey may be pretty damn close to purgatory, at least it’s not Nebraska.