While my mom suspects this may not be a real career, I enjoy it, often, without a second thought. Then I read Pete Wells’s column in The New York Times announcing he was stepping down as the newspaper’s restaurant critic.
Suddenly, I started having doubts about my chosen career path. The “come-to-Jesus” health moment Wells described sounded familiar.
Wells wrote about the doctor’s appointment where he learned he was technically obese, with cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure numbers that were, to put it mildly, suboptimal. Former New York Magazine food critic Adam Platt told Wells, “It’s the least healthy job in America, probably.”
Hyperbole aside, if reviewing restaurants is the least healthy job out there, is wine reviewing a close second?
People look at me funny when I tell them I put 3,000 wines in my mouth each year as part of my newspaper and magazine work. I get it. Wine reviewing at this level is a surreal extreme sport with more spitting than a season’s worth of New York Yankees games.
The problem is that while I jokingly describe my job as an extreme sport, I sure haven’t been training like an athlete.
I taste wines for work approximately 310 days a year. My routine on those days is to get up at 6 a.m., eat breakfast and go for a walk. After that, it’s showtime.
My mornings are spent doing newspaper work, which involves a lot of sitting in a chair. By late afternoon, I’m entering tasting notes into Wine Enthusiast’s database, which means more chair time. After that, I work with my assistant to prepare blind tastings that typically include eight to twelve wines.
Weighing in on the matter
But I’m spitting, so it’s no big deal, right?
Six years ago, when I took the plunge into full-time wine writing, my doctor politely called me un-pleasingly plump and brought up topics like pre-diabetes and hypertension. He also told me to shed 25 to 30 pounds, stat.
I didn’t believe him. I knew I wasn't the svelte guy I was in college, but I felt great.
After the Wells column came out, I called Patrick Comiskey, who spent 20 years as the domestic critic for Wine & Spirits Magazine. Comiskey and I are the same age, and he estimates that “at the height of things,” he, too, was tasting around 3,000 wines annually.
Comiskey said he gained two pounds a year "for a very long time" while reviewing wine. He also described a three-day wine tasting session in New York City, during which, after a few days of basically not moving from his chair, he developed stiffness in his knee, leading to a chronic problem that is only now returning to some sense of normal.
Inactivity and weight gain were also plaguing me, but I wasn’t paying attention. "It’s not too hard to be delusional about all of this," Comiskey says. "I’m still at the age where I can deny that I'm getting older and believe that things like this will go away."
I know what Comiskey means. I feel like I’m still 35, even if my blood vessels are under the illusion that they are pushing 78.
I told my doctor I walked six miles weekly. "Double it," he responded.
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