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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I do not own a tablet computer.

I also do not own a smartphone (many of you who have seen me at events in 2012 can attest to teasing me about the miserable state of affairs of my “dumb” phone, which now goes by the nickname “Jurassic Cell” and employs technology so ancient that it was, I think, left by the Apostles and rediscovered before being sold to me by Verizon several years ago). The closest I’ve gotten to the tablet craze is lugging around what I refer to as my iPod, which is an Apple iPhone 3GS I received from a 1WD reader for free, the phone portion having been disabled. An avid reader, I still “process” e-books on my first-generation Nook (and, even more tellingly, still love it; e-ink FTW!).

By my rough calculations, this all puts me squarely into “old fart” tech territory, a status a share with about 0.0023% of the First World’s population. It might actually make me retro-cool, but probably makes me more anti-cool than anything else. Whatever -  invested the several hundred bucks I haven’t spent on that tech, you beeaaatches!

Anyway, the entire world continues to go tablet crazy, to the point where there are now people who are looking to sell the iPad they bought just six months ago in order to purchase the slightly more upgraded same generation iPad announced by Apple last week. And now that Apple has joined Google, Nook, and Amazon and has entered the 7-whatever-inch tablet market (news you will already have heard, unless for some reason you’re dead), it’s been nearly universally agreed that the small tablet format (bridging the “gap” between phones and larger tablets and/or laptops) has officially arrived in terms of price/quality ratio.

What the hell does any of this have to do with wine?

A small bit, actually, but an important one for any people out there wanting to seriously up their personal Wine IQ…

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