Cork Envy’s Jason “Stub” Stubblefield is a musician and former Marine who makes video parodies about wine. Well, they’re tangentially about wine — and usually involve Stub (“no one calls me Jason”), who has a master’s degree in public policy, cracking wise on politics, pop culture or wine snobbery. In “First Growth,” the singer-songwriter laments the reasons he will “never try an ’82 Bordeaux” to the tune of Lorde’s “Royal.” “White Zin,” a spoof of the Police’s “Roxanne,” gives cougars permission to stop drinking “that swill tonight.” Stub is the cougar in red with the nice gams.
“It sounds cheesy to say I want to demystify wine, but I do want to help people who don’t know about wine to discover it,” he says by phone from Alexandria, Virginia, where he lives with his wife, a government executive who pops up on the blog as The Rib.
Sometimes the best way to do that is to keep it light and funny. Take “Date Night,” a weekly “W(h)ine” in which Stub jokes about our culture’s attachment to the term. He doesn’t get to the wine recommendation (a 2011 Quivira Zinfandel) until the end, and you don’t mind. Same with “Suit and Tie, Sequester Style,” which has nothing to do with wine — it’s about last year’s federal government shutdown. Jon Stewart, looking for a political wine correspondent? Ping Stub at www.corkenvy.com.
First encounter: “At a dinner party in 2001, someone brought a Fetzer gewürztraminer and I remember thinking, ‘I could drink two glasses of that.’ That’s when I realized there were discoveries to be made, because every wine I tried had been so different from the last.”
Latest discovery: “I like Tin Barn Zinfandel (Sonoma Valley). It kind of dances on your palate without exploding in your mouth 57 times with more fruit and alcohol than you can stand.”
Tuesday night pairing: “We’ve been having the Pine Ridge Vineyards Chenin Blanc Viognier with a grilled chicken salad almost weekly.”
— J. Yadegaran, Staff
