Not many students know that Rideout once worked in a winery that has been in his family for five generations. Rideout’s family lived in Algeria from the 1800’s to the 1960’s when they left for the French island of Corsica after an Algerian uprising against the French government.

“The primary reason why they repatriated there is because Corsica was undeveloped. With access to large tracts of land, they built a winery,” Rideout said.

In the 1980’s, after the death of Rideout’s grandfather, who had been running the winery his family established, Rideout’s uncle took the reins and has been running it ever since.

Throughout his childhood, Rideout visited the winery in France during his summer vacations. However, he had never seen it in action because the harvest season is in the fall.

“My uncle had always said, ‘You know, I don’t have any sons, so if you ever want to come over here and work, you can do that,’” said Rideout.

Taking a year of absence from graduate school, where he was studying physics, Rideout set out for France to work side by side with his uncle. He learned the process of transforming grapes into wine and was eventually left in charge of the winery on days his uncle had to run errands.

“I never went back to graduate school. I had a one year leave of absence, and then I stayed in France anywhere from two to six months for several years in a row,” Rideout said.

From 2000 to 2002, Rideout tried his hand at a small business venture of importing his uncle’s wine to the United States, but his life was beginning to move in a new direction.

“At the same time, I met my wife and moved to Massachusetts and started teaching. So it all started to change in 2002; we became engaged and I became a teacher and stopped importing the wine, and then that’s it. Now it’s back to just going to France to go on vacation,” said Rideout.

But the winery is not entirely in Rideout’s past. Rideout still remembers many of his stories from his winery days in his blog “Riddicisms.”

The name was originally derived when Rideout joked he would call his blog “Criticisms of Society” but his Honors Physics class thought that “Riddicisms of Society” would be more fitting.

“It started off as personal anecdotes and then it devolved to observations like, ‘Hey isn’t it interesting when this happens, and this happens,’ and then I started becoming reflective of my practices as a teacher,” said Rideout. “It’s some weird combination of jokes and science-y nerdy stuff.”

Through his blog, Rideout has found a way to remember his days working in the winery and share his stories with his students, so they can get to know him as more than their rapping physics teacher.