When Nerds SERIOUSLY Indulge Their Wine Habits

Meet Abe Schoener, he used to be my assistant dean and now he makes wine. Now THAT'S what I call a career change:

"Becoming a high-wire winemaker was an odd course for a man previously committed to teaching Plato’s The Republic. Armed with a doctorate from the University of Toronto, Schoener returned to his undergraduate alma mater, St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., for a professorship. This former assistant dean considered himself an academia lifer. Yet there he unwittingly laid the groundwork for his defection; he tended his organic garden, fell for plant physiology and fine-tuned his wine palate with colleagues. “Twice a month we’d taste a bunch of wines, at first studiously and then festively,” he says.

In 1998, Schoener began to crave breathing room. “The professor is supposed to be the best student in the class, and after nine years I was coasting,” he says. He and his wife headed to San Francisco for his sabbatical. “I had no idea what I was going to do, perhaps study Machiavelli. But it was my wife who encouraged my wine fanaticism and said, ‘Look to Napa.’ ”"