Meet the writer
Welcome, my name is Vincent Snell, my experience with deliberate consumption of wine to this point has been with the decisiveness to induce expedient inebriation. That is to say, wine was a means to get drunk and with general haste. There may have been the odd occasion of wine present for church, champagne for celebrations, or such similar "special" occasions but rarely was it something dwelled on and was more of an accessory to some other motive.
With such prior experience with wine, then why would I bother to take a foray into an academic assessment of such topics. My interest was first peeked during travels abroad as a United States Marine Embassy Security Guard, where on occasion the Marines at the embassy would be invited to dinners with the ambassador or other diplomatic dignitaries. These dinners would regularly include wine as the choice beverage, which was quite different from the typical Marine diet of Beer, Whiskey, Tobacco, and energy drinks. This contrast captured the idea of class associations with wine in my mind and created a brief sense of resentment toward this class symbol.
My interest in wine became stifled for some time after that experience and it wouldn't be until 2020 during the COVID lockdowns in the US that I would turn my eye toward wine with any form of interest again. During the 2020 lockdowns or perhaps late in 2019, I began to gain an affinity for amateur mycology and all thing fungi related. My interest ranged the full gambit of fungal life and this includes the very fungi used to brew a lot of alcohols, Saccharomyces aka Brewer's yeast. This new world of fermentation and fungi renewed my passions in not only wine but all of the cultural aspects of cuisine and drink.
This same passion is what led me to this course, Geography of Wine. I've already taken the Mysterious Mushrooms and Molds class provided at Virginia Tech and it seemed like a logical next step to delve deeper in to my new founded fermentation fascination by taking a course about the many different resulting products. What better product than wine, perhaps the oldest and most popular fermented product around the world.
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