Fredric Koeppel was born, of course, and went to school in several places, as most people do, and after teaching English in various universities and colleges for 17 years became a journalist and wrote a weekly national print column about wine for 20 years before leaping onto the Internet. KoeppelonWine (please see) was launched in December 2004 and the blog BiggerThanYourHead two years later.

Obviously the guy likes to eat and drink, but with pleasure balanced by skepticism; that’s what graduate school teaches you and years of grading freshmen research papers. He cares about language and literature, movies, music in almost all forms (not country or Hawaiian, sorry) and the visual arts, about which he writes for The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis, where he lives with his wife, five dogs and two cats.