Whenever you aspire to a distant, seemingly unattainable career, there is no better way to learn (other than offering your services on a “volunteer”/slavery basis) than to find great books on the subject of your interest. The magic of non-fiction books, in a field that you have no access to, is that such books, occasionally by way of a single poignant line, can deliver a kind of wisdom that you can’t find any other way.
The problem with some fields is that they haven’t necessarily become popular enough as to make the kind of books that would help you readily accessible.
I found this to be the case in the late 1980s and early 90s when I was aspiring to become a working screenwriter. Today, head on in to your average bookstore and not only will you find dozens of books on the subject — you’ll typically find a whole section dedicated to the genre. Back then there wasn’t a single tome in stock that could serve to enlighten: how did you go about selling your idea or screenplay? When you had it ready how did you find an agent? How did you go about writing a screenplay in the proper format? How long should one be?
The sibling fields of winemaking and viticulture have been, until only recently, plagued by a similar lack of “virtual access.” While there have been a number of wine-tasting and cellar-building books out there for years, it is still a rare book that you’ll find telling you what it’s really like to grow organic grapevines on an acre and a half of land — let alone how to do it. This dearth of commonly available storytelling is of course one of the main reasons I decided to launch garagevino.com. At least I could present my account on the Internet bookshelf, so to speak, of my seemingly backwards adventure of winemaking first, then the grape-growing second…and while I don’t have the foot-traffic of a Borders at a shopping mall cruising past these shelves, nonetheless I’ve received a few comments that lead one to believe that at least some of the process of trial-and-error I’m recounting here can be helpful.
Garagevino.com aside, I’ve sought out every book I can find on the topics of viticulture and winemaking, particularly as it relates to the lifestyle of giving it a go. There are some interesting and even enlightening books out there and I thought I would mention those that I’ve run across. It only took me two books – Syd Field’s Screenplay and William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade – to get me rolling as a screenwriter, and perhaps two of the books I mention here will wind up being all it takes for you to jump into an acre of Merlot.
When my artisan winery is up and running and my tasting room is open to the public, I intend to have the full collection of books on these topics stocked on the tasting room shelf. Come to wine country enjoy the fabulous feel of a valley of Paradise. Take home a case of handcrafted wine, and throw in a book or two — you’ll be equipped with enough resources to keep wine country in your life for a while longer, no matter where you live or what you do.
In the meantime, I present below a list of books that, in most cases, offer a first-person account of what it’s actually like to shed the city life, roll up your sleeves, and get your hands dirty doing something you’ve always dreamed of doing – in this case, becoming a winemaker or farmer.
One thing about these books is that with the occasional exception I have found a common theme, which I’ll call “real life,” residing in their storylines. Farming ain’t easy, and grape-growing in particular ain’t easy at all. Years rather than months are required to yield your first crop, and, well — guess what? Real life happens along the way, and real life ain’t always Disneyland. So in most of these books, the beauty and joy of a life lived with the Earth, following the seasons, is often paired, as you might expect, with marital problems, challenges with kids, arguments with neighbors, even the tragedy of death. What I like about these sobering facets of the otherwise stunning portrait of a life lived in vines is that these authors/farmers are, in their lives and in their books and writings, being brutally honest. If you’ve ever tried to grow more than a flower in your backyard, or even just that one flower, you’ll know that nature, while magnificent in what she provides, can also be devastating and mean. Slugs, snails, aphids, rabbits, gophers, humidity and drought – any or all will inevitably wreak havoc on your dream of cultivating a glorious plot of flowers or crop of anything at all.
And life packs the same wallop with people as nature does for the garden.
I think I was most moved by the eerie, almost subconscious theme in Paula Moulton’s autobiography about winegrape growing in Glen Ellen, in Sonoma County, called Seasons Among the Vines. In her book, she constantly describes her husband’s “need for speed” and the frantic pace at which he lived, from driving to working nonstop as a doctor – as though he had barely any time left to live. Meanwhile she was pursuing her dream of fleeing to the country from San Francisco and growing grapes, walking among the vines, being in nature — experiencing the bliss of seasonality. Her kids changed their attitudes, she changed her attitude, and she found was a life she’d never known to exist with satisfactions she’d never anticipated. But as you read her book you just got the idea something sad was lurking over the horizon.
After reading it, I looked up her name online, anticipating that she might have a small winery or a bigger vineyard by now — and was touched and saddened, but in a not-unexpected sort of way, to find a tragic story in the Santa Rosa Democrat, explaining that Moulton’s husband had been killed in a head-on collision in the rain on a Santa Rosa highway.
In the article it was said that he was driving too fast in the rain.
Another book I found interesting, at least personally, was The Vineyard by Louisa Hargrave. I say it was interesting personally because it chronicles the Hargraves’ determination to start the first vineyard and winery on New York state’s North Fork of Long Island. As with Paula Moulton’s book, The Vineyard is also rife with reality, since despite the years of hard work by Louisa Hargrave and her husband from their post-graduate days on into their 40s, and their against-the-grain success of single-handedly launching a wine region, let alone establishing a vineyard and winery in a challenging climate…nonetheless the Hargraves got divorced some years after publishing the book.
Not nearly as charming or emotional as Moulton’s, Hargrave’s is certainly a good read, and if you’re interested in hearing how somebody started literally from scratch in the viticulture-winemaking realm, in a place previously considered inhospitable to such, this book is a can’t-miss.
My nomination for the Golden Globe in the category of Best Vineyard Books of All Time has to be A Vineyard Year by Joseph Novitski, with photographs by Nick Pavloff. It is the story of a newspaper reporter’s decision to leave his regular old life behind and quite literally become a farmer. The thing about Novitski’s book though he is that he really became a farmer — this was not a vanity project for him, and in addition to his laying down some of the most glorious and poetic prose ever to describe a lifestyle, living or setting, he writes what is probably the most authentic and accurately portrayed depiction of what it really means to be a winegrape grower. Here is a guy who hires almost none of it out (only the basic needs for extra hands in the pruning and harvesting of 20 acres of Zinfandel). Here is a guy who literally became one of the old-school set of winegrape farmers in Healdsburg’s Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma County. Here is a guy who was on the tractor more than he was in his own house, at the dinner table, or asleep in bed. In my opinion it is the ultimate wine book. Sure, the focus is on farming here, so if you’re looking for secrets on which yeast to use in making that barrel of fashionable Pinot in your garage, you won’t find that advice here. But if you’re looking for a true-to-life, beautiful, yet readable and absolutely real account of what the (supposedly glamorous) world of winegrape farming is all about, then look no further.
Also worth noting in addition to the mosaic-like prose in Novitski’s work are some of the more beautiful photographs ever taken of California wine country.
Here’s a short list of other notable books on the topics of viticulture and the winemaking…I’ve also included a couple other books which help paint a picture of what wine country is really like — not just a snapshot of the tasting rooms one visits on a weekend trip, but an overall flavor presentation of life as it is out there:
• From Vines to Wines by Jeff Cox (the ultimate guide to growing your own vines and making wine on the garage level)
• At Home in the Vineyard by Susan Sokol Blosser (the tale of the genesis of Willamette Valley Pinot Noir industry)
• A Tale of Two Valleys by Alan Deutschman (more of a historical perspective, but conveys the ambiance of Sonoma and Napa Valleys)
• A Good Year by Peter Mayle (forget the movie, which wasn’t bad either; the story has problems; but the flavor of wine country is captured here)
I’m sure there are more than a few other books out there I’ve neglected to mention simply because I haven’t encountered and read them, so please send me an e-mail or comment if you have any to recommend, and I’ll include them in a subsequent entry.