Who dat?
File under department of Who Dat?
Last night at the excellent Crush wine store, I attended a book signing of Matt Skinner. Matt Kramer? No Matt Skinner. This, Aussie Matt was a surfer who started working in the local liquor shop to fund his surfing. After treating it just as a boring retail job, his boss showed him some surveillance camera video (slow down, Big Brother!) of him working, that is to say, reading the paper and pushing the beer. Confronted with such evidence of his poor wine performance, he decided to learn more about wine.
A few years later, the story goes, Jamie Oliver was on a book tour in the land of Oz and Matt went to meet him. Somehow, Matt then moved to London and started as Jamie’s sommelier at the celebrated restaurant Fifteen (The BBC TV “reality” program about opening the restaurant for underprivileged youth is quite worthwhile).
After three years at Fifteen, Mitchell Beazley approached him about writing a book, the story further goes. The book, Thirsty Work, aims to be a wine introduction for twentysomethings and is lighter than a chenin blanc. Matt told me that he’s not really a writer although he did write a few things for Australia’s Wine X magazine before it folded. No page of Thirsty Work is complete without a color picture and the font often changes size mid-sentence, starting big and ending normal sized. It’s the perfect wine book to read while getting your nails done, which apparently he does.
With foreign rights sold in several countries and six languages, he’ll no doubt be able to finance lots of surfing now–or even a nice cellar.
On November 21st, 2005 at 9:56 pm ,Dr. Vino wrote:
For more details, please see Tom’s write-up.
http://fermentation.typepad.com/fermentation/2005/11/thirsty_worka_b.html