Dr Vino's wine blog

David Pogue, tech columnist for the NYT, is known for his goofy videos. Earlier this week, on a lark, I joined him at his house to tape a segment about low-light cameras. Sure enough, it is pretty goofy–you can tune in to see my acting debut today at about 1:45 PM on CNBC. Don’t blink or you’ll miss my lines!

We were chatting during the taping and he told me that almost authored “Wine for Dummies” way back when. He had already written “Macs for Dummies,” which, if I were the publisher, I would never have even assigned since Macs are so intuitive. But it just goes to show what I know since the book was a tremendous success (he says that his current house is “the house that Dummies built”). The publisher wanted to continue the empowering, demystifying, how-to series and approached him and writing a wine book. He admitted that he knew little about wine but the publisher still wanted him on board. Ultimately, his schedule didn’t permit his involvement. (And “Wine for Dummies,” written by Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan, went on to become a huge success.)

Spying a small wine fridge in his family room, I asked Pogue if was looking forward to any particular wine over the holidays. He admitted that while wine is his drink of choice, he’s still “trying to learn what to drink, when.” He was shocked when a friend recently tut-tutted that she would never drink a certain wine with a certain food. He said he wants to learn more about the cultural aspects of drinking and once extensively searched online and came up empty handed. “And I thought that Google could find anything!” he said with a touch of irony.

After our taping ended, in true style of a renaissance man, he sat down behind the grand piano and started belting out some Christmas songs. Kristina, an excellent singer who also appears in the CNBC video, sang along. A great duo!