This month over at Wine.Answers.com, the following tidbits ensued for your wine reading/learning/geeking pleasure. While several numbers are involved, math is not, so if you find math mind-numbingly boring as I do, you can proceed to the following articles without fear:

The 411 on DCV:

I recently took a junket jaunt to Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma, more about which may unfold on these virtual pages later, but was impressed enough with some of the visits during that trip to offer up a quick take on 5 producers to watch in the area. Go forth, and Zin!

Bookish on 21 Wines:

In which I review yet another friggin’ coffee table style book about vino, “21 Wines.”This one has photos that are worth the admission price, though, and it’s a visual delight that manages to overcome the scattershot format of the text behind the Italian wine/producer recommendations (offered by the foodie authors).

The Surprisingly-Not-So-Weighty Power of 33:

Our product review this month comes via a sample of Angle 33’s concrete (yeah, that kind of concrete) wine bottle coaster. The summarized version is that I really dug this thing, which actually manages not to be too weighty, has a good deal of stylish options (provided you like Spartan, modern designs, which I do), and proves to be handy at ensuring your opened wine bottle doesn’t leave an irremovable stain from your furniture.

3 Things You Didn’t Know About Rioja:

Some of the tidbits that made it into my speeches during a recent gig in NYC with Wines of Rioja were just too geeky good to leave to the pages of my panel notes. So they made it to the virtual pages of Answers.com, in the form of three tidbits about the region of which you (most likely) were not aware.

Cheers – and enjoy!

In the “this is fun, and you’ll learn something, but it’s definitely NSFW!” department, I recently appeared on Playboy Radio’s “Playboy’s Playbook” (which airs Tuesdays at 11AM PT), chatting about all things wine with host Kevin Klein.

Klein seemed to know quite a bit more about wine – and, more importantly, how it should be enjoyed and provide pleasure – than he lets on during the interview, but then I suppose we should expect that kind of comfortable focus on pleasuring oneself (and potentially others) when it comes to Playboy, right?

Anyway…

We chat about my Playboy.com gig, how to superstitiously order wine at restaurants, why wine critics aren’t actually out to totally screw you over, the all-important wine-and-panties connection, and why it’s important to always have a bottle of inexpensive but good quality Cava chilling the refrigerator, especially if you’re single.

You can download a copy of the interview here, stream it at Playboyradio.com, or listen via the embed below; just break out the headphones for this one, because it is NOT safe for within-earshot-general-public consumption (I did mention this was Playboy radio, right?). Oh, and leave the hangups and inhibitions at home before listening, okay?

And before you ask: yes, we’ll get back to more wine recommendations next week. In the meantime, pour yourself a decent glass of Cava and listen to the interview!

1WineDude on Playboy Radio’s Playboy Playbook – Chapter # 33: Wine Wine Wine

Cheers!

This week, things are light here on 1WD, because when you’re reading this post, I’ll be doing something that I haven’t really done in almost the entire multi-year lifespan of this little corner of The Global Interwebs; take a vacation.

As in, a real vacation. As in, time off from everything-not-vacation-related, the kind of stuff that Europeans do and we Americans say we do but only really talk about doing.

And so in the spirit of life enrichment, today I point you to a (rather loooong – seriously, actino films aren’t this long) video interview I recently did with the boys behind the life-actualization site Brent Smith Lifestyle (embed action after the jump below).

BSL’s tagline is “We Will Give It To You Straight & Take Your Life To The Next Level” – they purport to offer the kind of no-nonsense, BS-free advice about taking responsibility for your own purpose and happiness in life with which I personally happen to identify strongly, and to which I can now attest as being genuine (after having chatted it up with the BSL staff for something like two hours).

They grilled me on just about every aspect of wine that you can imagine, but the thing that stuck with me the most after that interview is how obvious it is that wine appreciation can help to enrich your life. I don’t mean, get-your-buzz-on-and-get-laid enrichment (though that’s certainly one aspect of it), I mean actualize-your-life-Tony-Robbins-style enrichment .

Don’t believe me? Consider these tidbits…

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I’ve spent the better part of the first half of the year learning about… finance.

That is, now that wine is my “job,” (it feels really cool to type that) I needed another outlet, something about which I’d been passionate and wanted to learn more, to idle away the time learning during the down time (not that there’s much of it) when I’m traveling, or unwinding during the several seconds it takes me to fall asleep at night after chasing around my five year old daughter for the better of the day.

You know… a hobby.

Because I’m a geek (and for other reasons that I might get into here at a later date), I chose Finance. It’s amazing how deep the financial rabbit-hole goes, how much of it is related to human psychology, and the volume of parallels I’ve found in, for example, the world of investing with the world of wine media and wine scores.

During my drinking-from-the-Financial-knowledge-firehouse, I encountered this thread on the BogleHeads.org forum, titled What do you wish you had learned sooner?

It’s an amazing little forum thread, full of life, savings, and investment lessons gleaned from the cruelly sharp-focused prism of the kind of hindsight that can only come from mistake-making, coupled with the heat-induced etching into one’s memory that is the hallmark of losing one’s money to a stupid idea. I became somewhat fascinated by that thread, and it “bleeds yellow,” as in yellow highlighter, the kind of thing that you read and want to highlight because there’s so much to learn form it that it can only really be digested in chunks.

And it got me thinking, what did I wish I’d learned about wine sooner?…

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