WINE WRITER FREDRIC KOEPPEL GOING BIGGER
Heads to Substack
By Alan Goldfarb
Sept. 11, 2023
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: the question as to why Fredric Koeppel named his wine blog, starting in 2006, Bigger Than Your Head? If you’re someone who knows the origin of that sobriquet, you’re a big Kliban fan.
For it was a cartoon by the iconoclastic social critic, who gave the Memphis wine writer his purpose. As he tells it, Koeppel saw one of Kliban’s cartoons, which had a guy sitting at a restaurant. “The server comes with this huge pile of food. And the caption read: ‘Never eat anything bigger than your head.’ For some reason, that phrase resonated and it’s different enough that people notice it. And it doesn’t even have an illusion to wine.”
Koeppel’s reviews have resonated with his audience for 17 years, although it’s never generated a lot of money. So, in an attempt to garner a wider audience for his pithy, humorous, erudite, urbane reports, he’s taken BTYH to Substack; the online writer’s platform, that if he generates enough marketing, might succeed in letting a wider audience in on his work.
There’s an irony to naming his columns after a cartoonist who drew the foibles, misdeeds, funny and cuddly machinations of cats. While Koeppel grew up with felines, “I never had a dog,” he tells me. “When my now wife and I, were one day driving down in Mississippi, we saw a little dog in the ditch. That was our first dog (a border collie mix). In ’03 three dogs started running around the cove at our house and we took them in. Pretty soon we had five. That seemed to us, ‘that is a shitload of dogs’”.
With his wife -- museum director Leslie Luebbers at the art museum of the University of Memphis -- he started fostering dogs in ’08. At one point, they were caring for 12 dogs! They are down to seven and “they’re getting old, just like us.” (Koeppel is 78) Over the last 20 years, by his count, they have fostered 75 or 80 canines.
It is facile to describe Koeppel as a renaissance man, but he is of sorts. He is a well-published poet and apparently an accomplished cook, going by his many online posts of dishes he’s prepared.
“I cook every meal we eat in this house, and do all the shopping,” he says. “My mother didn’t like cooking, or eating very much. If you have the right pans and right knives, you can cook anything. You just have to be brave, willing to say, ‘OK, this recipe looks complicated but I think I can do it.’ After a cocktail and watching the news, it (a dish) has to be something that’s ready at 8 o’clock. I don’t think of myself as a particularly good cook when I’m in the kitchen chopping something, but I think 10 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do this.”
As for his poetry and fiction writing for which he says, “I never get paid,” he’s been publishing poetry since the ‘70s, and writing stories since the ’80s, “Once I got a check for $10. But that’s who I am and that’s what I do.”
He’s been writing since he was 13. His mother a poet, read to him constantly. “I was writing so much they got me a big Underwood that looked like a piano.
“My life is basically about reading and writing,” he explains. “It’s been that way since I was a child. If I have a day in which I haven’t written something or read, I go to bed feeling worthless; something’s not right about the day. If people know what I read, eat and drink and think about some things, that’s all they need to know. Everything that I am, is in those things. Everything wraps around creativity and sensory impressions.”
All this has softened the playing field for his Substack column (https://biggerthanyourhead.substack.com/), which he started about a month ago. A sample of BTYH posted recently after being frustrated by the lack of background and detailed information about the wines he had been sent by a marketer. That person apparently didn’t know much about follow-up and how to handle a wine journalist. Thus, he explains his M.O. “I like to make each review a little journey into the life of the wine. Peeling back the layers so people get an idea of the depth and dimension of the wine. When I sit down to taste, I spend an hour on one wine. Not 5 minutes.”
Which led him to circumvent the woeful lack of info on a flight of wines sent him:
“So, that’s what I have to work with. So be it. I’ll write about the wines anyway; that’s why they were sent to me.”
That paragraph goes to Koeppel’s integrity, a rare commodity given the state of journalism.
And here’s an excerpt from a piece he wrote back in 2012; which illustrates that veracity titled, “Wine & Vulgarity”:
‘Wine can … be vulgar, by which I mean a wine whose treatment sensationalizes a grape’s aspects instead of allowing them a natural and authentic expression; a wine whose inherent character is obliterated by the ego of its winemaker and manipulator; a wine whose making bends it out of proportion to its … logical necessity, range and delivery.
“A zinfandel or cabernet sauvignon or syrah/shiraz wine whose super-ripe grapes and high alcohol content, say, 15.5 or 16 percent, manifest themselves as cloying, jammy sweetness and a hot, unbalanced finish … is decidedly an example of vulgarity. A chardonnay, pumped up like a be-drugged athlete with barrel fermentation, aging in high-toast barrels and malolactic fermentation so that it turns out tasting like pineapple custard, roasted marshmallows, guava cream and … is another example of the vulgarization of an unsuspecting grape that can’t fight back.
“Give me, then, a wine that’s spare and elegant and lithe; a wine whose well-considered time in oak … provides support and suppleness and shades of nuance; a wine that honors the nature and potential of the grape or grapes from which it was made and, if possible, the place where those grapes grew; a wine that is not burdened and overwhelmed by inessential technical prowess; give me, above all, delight and daring, confidence and authenticity with a little risk and individuality, like that ballerina who knows the steps and the movements, all the classical requirements, by heart yet invests her performance with added spirit, those ‘twisty things’ that lift her into otherworldly beauty.”
Written and proferred by a poet and a journalist worthy of our attention.