CULTURE, PLACE, PLANET ("The sense of smell explores." - Brillat-Savarin)
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Here's my bio, a live radio interview, and a review of Nose. (Also a link for for the ebook and on-demand editions of The Big Easy, Memphis Afternoons, World's End and The Kingdom in the Country)
James Conaway
Photo by Peter Menzell
I’m a former Wallace Stegner writing fellow
at Stanford University and an Alicia Patterson
journalism fellow, and the author of three novels, The Big Easy, World’s End,
and the just-released Nose.
After I left Stanford I had a new
wife and a newer baby and badly needed a job. The Times-Picayune dangled one: general assignments reporter. I grabbed
it although I never took a journalism course and didn’t know New Orleans. I arrived alone right ahead of
Hurricane Betsy, drank too much Dixie beer the night before I was to report for
work, and woke up surrounded by downed trees and streets full of glass. I got
to the old Picayune building two
hours before anyone. When the city editor arrived he asked who I was and then,
because I was the only person available, told me, “Go out and write a story
about the effects of the storm on New
Orleans.”
It wasn’t a very good story but it was
printed on page one, with a byline, because no other reporters had showed up.
For the next two weeks I worked 14-hour days, learning more than I ever would
have in J-school, and thereby became indentured to a great profession that
would later inspire and inform my fiction.
I’m also the author of nine books of
nonfiction including the best-selling, Napa: The Story of an American Eden.
Frank Prial writing in the New York Times
said I was "a reporter with a Saroyan-like sense of humor and a
Balzac-like eye for detail," which made me very happy. That book has been
in print continually since 1990 and people still tell me they enjoy and learn
from it.
Napa’s
sequel appeared in 2002. The Far Side of
Eden: Old Land, New Money and the Battle for Napa Valley was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year and described in
the New York Times Book Review as
"an important story, emblematic of our time."
My other books include the memoir, Memphis Afternoons, about growing up in Memphis in the Fifties,
and The Kingdom in the Country. It’s
a personal journey through the public lands of the American West described by
Wallace Stegner as "a very lively book... He got into places and
activities that most westerners never even get close to," and by novelist Jim
Harrison as "a wonderful and well-considered evocation of the New
West."
Of my history of the Smithsonian
Institution, Evan S. Connell wrote, "Nobody will attempt to one-up Conaway
for a long time because he, like his subject, has gathered all things
relevant." I’m also the author of America's Library: A History of the Library of
Congress, 1800-2000, published by Yale University Press.
For four
years I was the editor of Preservation,
the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and I took up oil painting around that
time, some of it inspired by travel. Those paintings reflected landscapes,
structures, and artifacts affected by accelerated change, what had developed as
an on-going theme in my writing. One series was inspired by photographs of
western landscapes I took from the windows of airplanes, done in both the
conventional manner and by moving paint on the canvas to capture the mystery of
land viewed from 35,000 feet.
Painting
was another way to reflect the land and the rapidly altering face of our
natural and cultural worlds.
My next book, Vanishing
America: In Search of Our Elusive Landscapes, was a collection of travel essays about lost culture and
landscape. Lehrer wrote that it represented my “journalistic and insightful
best,” and I agree. Writer Tracy Kidder kindly described it as “an enthralling,
lovely tribute to a lot of what is precious in America.”
My
new novel, Nose, from Thomas Dunne
Books (St. Martin’s Press), is about the winegrowing culture of northern California and described
by the publisher as “Bonfire of the Vanities meets Sideways.” Jim Lehrer calls
it “the
novel for all seasons—and readers... a love(s) story, an under-all-the-soil
good and evil saga plus a marvelous tour through and about the world of
winemaking. And Jim Conaway’s prose is as gorgeous as some of the Northern California scenes he describes.”
I’ve written for lots of magazines over
the years, including The New York Times
Magazine, Atlantic, Harper’s, The New
Republic, Gourmet,
Smithsonian and Nat Geographic
Traveler. I won first place in a North American Travel Writers
Association competition for my series, “Walk into America,” that appeared in Traveler, and I’ve taught creative
non-fiction at the University of
Pittsburgh and at Johns Hopkins and George Mason universities.
I still
contribute tor Geographic’s travel
blog, Intelligent Travel, as well as
my own cjonwine.blogspot.com. I’m working on a prequel to Nose, about the explosion in the
popularity of previously little-known California wine, the beautiful countryside
of northern California that produces it, and the rise of a young British
critic, Clyde Craven-Jones.
Meanwhile
my wife, Penny, a caterer, and I divide our time between Washington, D.C., and
the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, with frequent trips to
California. Our mutual hobbies are cooking, travel (our children live in the
Midwest and on the West Coast), hiking, and some fly fishing.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
From Jeff Schechtman's radio show, "Specific Gravity"
_____________________________________________________________________________
Craven-Jones is just one character in the besotted rogue's gallery that populates the California subculture Mr. Conaway dubs "Enotopia." Other figures include the downsized journalist turned muckraking wine blogger Les Breeden; the feuding Hutt family, which owns the high-end label Copernicus and is struggling to stay afloat; the iconoclastic Cotton Harrell, an innovator of organic viniculture; and a host of noisily opinionated amateur wine connoisseurs (in any other setting they'd be called drunks).
The lively plot concerns the search for the maker of an unmarked bottle of Cabernet to which Craven-Jones has awarded the highest possible score. But the mystery is a genial MacGuffin. Mr. Conaway's real interest is in giving a loving, lightly critical portrayal of a region where wine has grown from a local passion to a cutthroat big business. "God, what an incestuous world it had become, and what a wonderful one," Craven-Jones thinks at a soirée for Copernicus's annual grape harvest. "Twenty years ago there would have been real farmers here, ruddy-faced men not in tuxedos but in lumpy jackets and their friendly wives enjoying a party, companionable and full of advice for newcomers. Today, the burnished complexions all belonged to golfers and mountain scramblers."
To borrow from the wine critics, "Nose" offers a burst of hearty comic notes and finishes with a lingering penumbra of bittersweet nostalgia.
On-demand new editions of The Big Easy and Memphis Afternoons will also soon be available.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
From Jeff Schechtman's radio show, "Specific Gravity"
Fiction Chronicle: A Consummately Pleasing Taste of Napa
A lively satire of California's "Enotopia" and the local passion that has become big business.
By SAM SACKS in the Wall Street Journal
Set in Northern California, James Conaway's "Nose" (Thomas Dunne, 326 pages, $24.99) introduces the transplanted British wine critic Clyde Craven-Jones, whose magazine, "Craven-Jones on Wine," has the power to make or break "reputations, vintages, business deals, marriages, even lives." Imperious and obese, he sees himself "as the rightful successor to noblemen of old, preserving that most august expression of culture against the onslaught of the vine louse and the wine blogger." His olfactory sense is so keen that an uncapped magic marker can irreparably disturb a tasting.Craven-Jones is just one character in the besotted rogue's gallery that populates the California subculture Mr. Conaway dubs "Enotopia." Other figures include the downsized journalist turned muckraking wine blogger Les Breeden; the feuding Hutt family, which owns the high-end label Copernicus and is struggling to stay afloat; the iconoclastic Cotton Harrell, an innovator of organic viniculture; and a host of noisily opinionated amateur wine connoisseurs (in any other setting they'd be called drunks).
The lively plot concerns the search for the maker of an unmarked bottle of Cabernet to which Craven-Jones has awarded the highest possible score. But the mystery is a genial MacGuffin. Mr. Conaway's real interest is in giving a loving, lightly critical portrayal of a region where wine has grown from a local passion to a cutthroat big business. "God, what an incestuous world it had become, and what a wonderful one," Craven-Jones thinks at a soirée for Copernicus's annual grape harvest. "Twenty years ago there would have been real farmers here, ruddy-faced men not in tuxedos but in lumpy jackets and their friendly wives enjoying a party, companionable and full of advice for newcomers. Today, the burnished complexions all belonged to golfers and mountain scramblers."
To borrow from the wine critics, "Nose" offers a burst of hearty comic notes and finishes with a lingering penumbra of bittersweet nostalgia.
To order my latest novel, Nose,
click on:
My first novel, The Big Easy (Houghton Mifflin) is available now in ebook form, as is my memoir, Memphis Afternoons (Houghton). Very soon my travelogue about the American west, The Kingdom in the Country, and my second novel, World's End (William Morrow), will also be available. Go now to: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm On-demand new editions of The Big Easy and Memphis Afternoons will also soon be available.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Birth of a (fictional) wine blog
In this excerpt of the novel, due out next month from St. Martin's Press, the young Les Breeden finds himself in the grip of the master's wife, Puligny Montrachet, and the blogosphere:
"You shouldn't even be here."
"No."
"You can shower before you leave."
The guest bathroom, spiffy towels, rosemary-mint shampoo. Tepid water ran over his body while he tried to hold onto her in his mind. The bungee was still there, on the up-swing, tightening again although he would soon be gone and this sweet respite a memory he could already see trending bitter. He came out toweling, and remembered that his clothes were in the hallway.
Claire held the pillow slips while he, wrapped in terrycloth, stuffed. She said, “You left a sock in the dryer,” schoolmarmy, back in her ugly smock. He went back into the guest bedroom and put on his jockey shorts, and she came abruptly in, without knocking. She sat on the bed. He reached for the clean jeans and felt a hand on the soft bump of him. Claire said, “You’re bad.”
“Yes.”
“We’re not doing this.”
“No.”
But she pulled his shorts down and knelt before him, adding, “This is just ridiculous.”
They ended up together on the narrow bed, she on top, his hands full of her hips, Claire’s arms twisted above her head like a piece of lovely, tortured bonsai. He heard a sound like none other, a sort of melodious exclamation. Were those words? He was acquainted with the panoply of orgasm – howlers, mummers, catatonics – but this was entirely new.
“You can’t stay.”
“No.”
“You’re probably hungry.”
“Yes.”
“I suppose we could order in.”
The delivery guy recoiled as Les flung open the front door and plunged both hands into the big, padded envelope. Grabbing two fistfuls of paper bag, the slick white cartons with little wire handles emitting a medley of smells: pad thai, chicken with cashews, soggy veggies, something on skewers.
They attacked them at the desk, across from each other as before, he ravenous, she controlled but persistent. The feast moved as if by prearrangement to the floor, kilim as table cloth, fingers as serving utensils, Claire politely excusing herself and going into the kitchen and returning with a golden, sweating bottle he recognized from the label as a primo anti-Californian: Puligny Montrachet. She poured two tumblers full, raised one, and said, “Just this once.”
"Would you like a shrimp?”
He tried to feed her, and she bit it off down to the tail. He fed her another. She watched him shovel rice into his mouth as demurely as possible with chopsticks.
Suddenly it was dark outside, conversation futile. Les couldn’t keep his hands off her, or his lips; she tasted of basil, and crispy orange beef. Back in the guest room, she shoved him onto the mattress and pulled off what was left of his clothes, then her own. She stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, breathing deeply, deciding something, then firmly pulled him out into the hallway, back past more notables – Tchelistcheff, de Latour, Parker, Masson, Ray - and into the master suite where the bed was vast, the white comforter like surf into which they waded.
Again urging him down, mounting, then under him, back muscles flexed, arching her neck and forcing him to kiss her. He had a view of the valley through tall glass panels as they moved, his hands sliding from her delicate pelvis to her breasts, back again, stunned by pleasure and the spectacle of that shadowy land suffused with pale green light.
He woke up suddenly and lay listening. The only sound was Claire delicately snoring, the comforter over her shoulders and her hip exposed. He got up, fondly kissed her ass, and pulled the comforter over it.
Out in the kitchen, cold floor, ruins of their repast. He poured himself half a glass of Puligny-Montrachet and ran a finger around the dark interior of a paper carton. Peanut sauce. Back in the bedroom, he got her laptop from amidst photographs of her family, stolid-looking types in big collars, standing under deciduous trees. Shots of CJ, too, in foreign climes, younger, thinner. Also a piece of quartz, a buffalo carved from soapstone, a ceramic lamp from the Mediterranean, a brochure from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
He carried the computer and his glass to the divan in front of the window and powered on. The screen assumed a gibbous glow like that emanating from the dead satellite grown smaller in the western sky. He pulled up a blank page and touched the keyboard. Like one of those hot-air balloons that in a few hours would add bright pricks of pigment to a dawn sky, he levitated, words winging in from elsewhere, un-summoned, unstoppable. Moon to moon.
Could that be the collective stench of a thousand wine opinion mongers and publicists and wannabe sommeliers pouring with sweat as they turn out a collective magnum opus of bullshit so prodigious that it threatens to destabilize the globe and send it off-orbit?
It could. And while, dear reader, you’re searching for what’s left of your emasculated skepticism, the load has gotten heavier. Seismologists are warning – LISTEN! - of a reactivation of the San Andreas fault and the tipping of millions of gallons of vitis vinifera into the bowels of the earth.
You might as well watch, having nothing to lose but your subscription to that brothel serviette, The Wine Taster, and its lame imitators. You don’t need them. You’re tired of being bloviated about which wine to buy, but not who’s doing what to whom in which cellar (is that wine thief going into a cask of aging cabernet or into the proprietor’s spouse?), of lifestyle vintneramuses and celebrity auction addicts buying matched sets of jeroboams of old Dripping Creek cabernet.
All passé. Forget numerical ratings and the latest Two-Buck Fuck, forget medals. What you need is an un-sanitized, morning-after whiff of the infinitely varied, often tight-assed infiniti di vini on America’s western edge, where they’re staging the last agrarian act in that amazing, transformative, longest-running, sputtering musical, “Manifest Destiny.” And now you’ve got one! Right here!! Nose!!!
So just log on, kick back, sniff, sniff...
To order Nose, click on:
http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose
"That was wrong."
"Yes.""You shouldn't even be here."
"No."
"You can shower before you leave."
The guest bathroom, spiffy towels, rosemary-mint shampoo. Tepid water ran over his body while he tried to hold onto her in his mind. The bungee was still there, on the up-swing, tightening again although he would soon be gone and this sweet respite a memory he could already see trending bitter. He came out toweling, and remembered that his clothes were in the hallway.
Claire held the pillow slips while he, wrapped in terrycloth, stuffed. She said, “You left a sock in the dryer,” schoolmarmy, back in her ugly smock. He went back into the guest bedroom and put on his jockey shorts, and she came abruptly in, without knocking. She sat on the bed. He reached for the clean jeans and felt a hand on the soft bump of him. Claire said, “You’re bad.”
“Yes.”
“We’re not doing this.”
“No.”
But she pulled his shorts down and knelt before him, adding, “This is just ridiculous.”
They ended up together on the narrow bed, she on top, his hands full of her hips, Claire’s arms twisted above her head like a piece of lovely, tortured bonsai. He heard a sound like none other, a sort of melodious exclamation. Were those words? He was acquainted with the panoply of orgasm – howlers, mummers, catatonics – but this was entirely new.
“You can’t stay.”
“No.”
“You’re probably hungry.”
“Yes.”
“I suppose we could order in.”
The delivery guy recoiled as Les flung open the front door and plunged both hands into the big, padded envelope. Grabbing two fistfuls of paper bag, the slick white cartons with little wire handles emitting a medley of smells: pad thai, chicken with cashews, soggy veggies, something on skewers.
They attacked them at the desk, across from each other as before, he ravenous, she controlled but persistent. The feast moved as if by prearrangement to the floor, kilim as table cloth, fingers as serving utensils, Claire politely excusing herself and going into the kitchen and returning with a golden, sweating bottle he recognized from the label as a primo anti-Californian: Puligny Montrachet. She poured two tumblers full, raised one, and said, “Just this once.”
"Would you like a shrimp?”
He tried to feed her, and she bit it off down to the tail. He fed her another. She watched him shovel rice into his mouth as demurely as possible with chopsticks.
Suddenly it was dark outside, conversation futile. Les couldn’t keep his hands off her, or his lips; she tasted of basil, and crispy orange beef. Back in the guest room, she shoved him onto the mattress and pulled off what was left of his clothes, then her own. She stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, breathing deeply, deciding something, then firmly pulled him out into the hallway, back past more notables – Tchelistcheff, de Latour, Parker, Masson, Ray - and into the master suite where the bed was vast, the white comforter like surf into which they waded.
Again urging him down, mounting, then under him, back muscles flexed, arching her neck and forcing him to kiss her. He had a view of the valley through tall glass panels as they moved, his hands sliding from her delicate pelvis to her breasts, back again, stunned by pleasure and the spectacle of that shadowy land suffused with pale green light.
He woke up suddenly and lay listening. The only sound was Claire delicately snoring, the comforter over her shoulders and her hip exposed. He got up, fondly kissed her ass, and pulled the comforter over it.
Out in the kitchen, cold floor, ruins of their repast. He poured himself half a glass of Puligny-Montrachet and ran a finger around the dark interior of a paper carton. Peanut sauce. Back in the bedroom, he got her laptop from amidst photographs of her family, stolid-looking types in big collars, standing under deciduous trees. Shots of CJ, too, in foreign climes, younger, thinner. Also a piece of quartz, a buffalo carved from soapstone, a ceramic lamp from the Mediterranean, a brochure from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
He carried the computer and his glass to the divan in front of the window and powered on. The screen assumed a gibbous glow like that emanating from the dead satellite grown smaller in the western sky. He pulled up a blank page and touched the keyboard. Like one of those hot-air balloons that in a few hours would add bright pricks of pigment to a dawn sky, he levitated, words winging in from elsewhere, un-summoned, unstoppable. Moon to moon.
Could that be the collective stench of a thousand wine opinion mongers and publicists and wannabe sommeliers pouring with sweat as they turn out a collective magnum opus of bullshit so prodigious that it threatens to destabilize the globe and send it off-orbit?
It could. And while, dear reader, you’re searching for what’s left of your emasculated skepticism, the load has gotten heavier. Seismologists are warning – LISTEN! - of a reactivation of the San Andreas fault and the tipping of millions of gallons of vitis vinifera into the bowels of the earth.
You might as well watch, having nothing to lose but your subscription to that brothel serviette, The Wine Taster, and its lame imitators. You don’t need them. You’re tired of being bloviated about which wine to buy, but not who’s doing what to whom in which cellar (is that wine thief going into a cask of aging cabernet or into the proprietor’s spouse?), of lifestyle vintneramuses and celebrity auction addicts buying matched sets of jeroboams of old Dripping Creek cabernet.
All passé. Forget numerical ratings and the latest Two-Buck Fuck, forget medals. What you need is an un-sanitized, morning-after whiff of the infinitely varied, often tight-assed infiniti di vini on America’s western edge, where they’re staging the last agrarian act in that amazing, transformative, longest-running, sputtering musical, “Manifest Destiny.” And now you’ve got one! Right here!! Nose!!!
So just log on, kick back, sniff, sniff...
To order Nose, click on:
http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Welcome to Enotopia
To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html
To order my novel, Nose,
click on:
Excerpted from the novel due March 12 from Thomas Dunne Books (St. Martin's Press) wherein the neophyte enters the shadowy world of Glass Act:
Two shiny couches, what looked like
walls of unfinished timber, and not a single customer. He went in and sat at
the scuffed, darkly lacquered bar with no beer taps. Those walls were really
the ass ends of wine crates, branded with family names. A heavy-set man in a
leather jerkin and gray pony tail was climbing down from a ladder used to reach
bottles stored in what looked like old feed bins. He asked, “What’s your
varietal, cowboy?”
“My what?”
“You’re not from around here, are
you?”
“I just got hired by the Press. I want a beer.”
“That’s not a sin. The Press, huh? Well, you have my
sympathies.”
He was Ben Something-or-other, Slavic-like,
extending a sand-papery hand at the end of a stout, hairy forearm wrapped with
a sweat-stained leather bracelet.
“I’m Les Breeden. From Chico.”
“Well, Les from Chico, don’t you think you might like some
familiarity with the valley’s main product? To adequately serve that great
metropolitan daily?”
Not waiting for an answer, Ben held
up a black bottle with an elaborate silver device in the neck and poured two
fingers of red wine into a big, stemmed glass. Les wished he had just walked
out, but it was too late. Then he noticed the price chalked on the board behind
the bar. “Seven dollars? No way.”
“Indulge me. The first glass for a
visiting fireman in hard times is free. Taste a pinot noir from the Central Coast to launch you on a voyage that, if
you’re like the rest of us, will be long, and eventful. Stick your nose into
the glass, inhale, and tell me what it smells like.”
Les went along with it. “Grapes?”
“Not specific enough. Think fruit.”
“Strawberries?”
“Better. Now drink, but...” Ben
already had a mouthful of wine. “... don’
schwallow. Shuck som’ air. Then closh lips and blow out da nose...”
Les tried. A surprisingly potent,
fragrant liquid went up the wrong way and came painfully out his nostrils and
all over the bar. Ben clawed the towel from his shoujlder and wiped down his
jerkin first. “That wasn’t auspicious,” he said. “Let’s try again.”
“Don’t think so, but thanks for the
introduction.”
“Wait, you’ve got to try the syrah,
for contrast. Don’t aerate this one, and you don’t have to spit.” A web of
smile lines transformed Ben’s otherwise scary face. “Okay, syrah’s called shiraz in Australia,
and in France.
Persia’s
where it came from. Got that? Ancient grape, modern renditions.”
This wine was darker than the
first. Les could smell it from two feet away, and feel it coating his teeth
like little, furry sweaters. Ben was sloshing his wine around in his mouth, so
Les tried that, too. The syrah was delicious. “Hot around the gums,” he said,
taking a chance. “No resemblance to the stuff in jugs, or the wine coolers we
used to drink Davis.”
“We’re progress. The heat comes
from high alcohol, our big problem in California.
And a paradox: if sun’s good for grapes, how can it be bad for wine? Because it
drives up the sugars.”
“What are sugars?”
“Don’t get hung-up on the lingo, Chico. Words like
‘sugars,’ ‘varietal,’ they make some people sound smart so they’re here to
stay. The important thing is, sugar makes wines pop, with the help of microbes.
Basically the little buggers eat the sweet juice and excrete alcohol. The more
sugar there is to eat, the more alcohol’s produced, the more powerful the
wine.”
“So we get high on bacteria shit?”
“Basically. Alcohol also masks a
wine’s defects, so winemakers love it. And big alcohol gets people thirsting
for that initial blast of fruit, but it also makes them drunk.”
“What’s ‘Californicated’?”
“Too much oak – splinters in the
gums from too much time in new barrels.”
They drank again. Ben placed a
basket of crackers on the bar. “Cleans the palate,” he explained, and turned
and climbed back on the ladder, the treads worn by the passage of many feet.
Ben looked up and down the bins, fingered a bottle and brought it down. “Now
for the coup de grace, cabernet
sauvignon, the valley’s triumph. Don’t let anybody tell you differently. The
best ain’t pinot, it ain’t syrah, it ain’t sangiovese. Merlot, chardonnay,
sauvignon blanc, all fall beneath the jackboots of Almighty Cab. The fuel under
the fire, the sex in the enological equation.”
With a stroke of a mounted
contraption looking like a bronze bicycle pump he delivered the cork right
through the metal foil. “Ideally the wine should breathe, but life’s short.”
Then he reached down two fresh
glasses that might have held goldfish at the county fair and generously poured.
Les found his mouth watering as he watched the wine rise in his glass, the
smell differing from the others. He said, “Dusty.”
“That’s tannin. What else?”
“Some kind of berry?”
“Good. And?”
“Sawdust?”
“Pencil shavings?”
“Yeah.”
“Spot on, Les.”
The door opened and a couple came
in, he in a white shirt and jeans, his long, dark hair in ringlets, she looking
Asian but wearing a safari suit and wide-brimmed felt hat. “Hey, Benny,” the
young man said.
“Hey, Train. Kiki.”
They sat down and Ben dragged the
bottle of cab over to them, covering the label with the soiled towel. “This
gentleman and I were just sampling a very excellent expression of mountain
vines on a southwest facing slope. What say?”
“Sure,” said Train.
Les noticed the Ferrari parked at
the curb outside and was glad he had left his truck up the street. A clear
plastic shield covered the outsized engine, which was painted red. “Testarossa,” said Train, noticing his
interest. “Eats BMWs for lunch. Who’re you?”
“This is Les,” said Ben. “A
reporter, and a damned good one.”
“I’m Train, this is Kiki. And this
is...” Train smelled, tasted, sighed. “... is an ’02...”
Les didn’t catch the name, not that
it mattered. Ben whipped off the towel. “Mi
complimenti!”
“Grazie.”
Then somehow the bottle was empty.
Kiki went on text messaging, Train and Ben talking, Les looking up contentedly
at the wall of famous wineries with proper names, some of them famous, but also
those of mountains, ridges, creeks, valleys, trees, flowers, fish, mammals,
birds, women, even pickups. The variety was mesmerizing.
“I’m feeling the need of a
flatlander,” said Train, and Kiki squealed with delight and pushed aside her
cell phone. Ben moved crabwise toward his ladder, saying in passing, “You’re on
your own now, Chico.”
Next: Les Breeden, PI
The dream was mauve, smelling of
some violent earthly upheaval. Darkness filled with faces, all women’s; each
time he reached, they receded. Then he was drifting on an incoming tide that
flooded the flats, unburdened except for the pain behind his eyes, something
unspeakable gaining on him, the tide turning, carrying him backward...
Thin morning light lay in neatly
scissored strips on the concrete floor of Les’s apartment. His cell phone alarm
had used up the remaining battery power, and Les still wore his trousers and
socks. A scrub jay sitting on the landlord’s rock-sawing bench outside the
window reminded him that it was a new day, but he couldn’t let go of the faces
of the night before. New ones had appeared at the bar, indistinct now, but not
the feeling of bonhomie, everyone happy, knowledgeable, privileged, including
Les.
He showered and put on clean
clothes and drove downtown, parking outside a still-darkened Glass Act. What
had Ben said? “If I don’t have one before eleven, I must have eleven before
one.” The words had been attributed to a Spanish sherry producer, touched each
day with a yearning for artisanal alcohol.
It was cool in the depths of Glass
Act, the door hanging open to the view of willows on the far side, in the lee
of half-finished construction out of another century. Ben was up on the ladder -
lived there, it seemed - sleeves rolled, a case of something balanced
dangerously on his head. Shirttail out, heels fleshy nubs at the back of clogs.
“Yo, Chico,” he
called. “Have a seat.”
Ben dismounted and plunged a hand
into the cooler; he lifted a dripping, golden bottle like some miracle from a
blessed fount, the fancy rubber cork coming out with a whishhh. The bottle advanced on two narrow glasses. “No,” said Les.
“Don’t tell a soul, but this is
French. It’s also the best fucking Muscat
on earth.”
Pouring now, the exotic smell
swimming through the intervening air like something alive, the glass absorbing
all available light. “Beaume de Venise.” Ben was grinning for, yes, it was the
best thing Les had ever tasted. For a time he couldn’t speak, gulls calling as
if from a great distance, car doors slamming, classical music Les couldn’t
identify seeping from dusty speakers in the dark corners of the ceiling.
“Albinoni’s Adagio,” said Ben. “We
should settle up.”
“Settle up what?”
“Your bill.”
“I didn’t know I had one.”
Ben placed the itemized receipt on
the bar, Les’s initials scrawled at the bottom but the items listed above it
all too legible. “Two hundred and
seventy-three dollars?”
“You bought a Ridge zin, then
insisted on buying into Train’s super-dooper Tuscan. I thought that one was a
bad choice, but you guys wouldn’t listen. Then...”
“It’s the biggest bar bill in
history.”
“Welcome to Enotopia, Chico.”
Next: Les Breeden, PI
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Letter from Maui
After a long absence from this blog, the indefatigable Doc Lang has just checked in again, this time from the South Seas:
Aside from Spam dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner
and that Polynesian favorite - white rice with mayonnaise
and potatoes - Hawaiian cuisine has lately come up with a
food with mainland appeal - beer. Two microbreweries in the
islands are producing ales, lagers and porters that are as
good as suds get. Maui Brewing and Kona Brewing are little
known outside the islands, which consume nearly all the
output, but both are expanding and and becoming more
available especially on the West Coast.
I think flavored beers generally have the lasting appeal
of flight attendants making cutesy PA announcements. Kona
offers one spiced with coriander and mandarin oranges (I
didn't dare). But both micro-breweries produce porters with
roasted coconut that are subtle, avoid sweetness, and are
worth the belch.
Doc offers this as a crucial part of "the library of
Hawaiian cuisine"
Friday, February 8, 2013
New excerpt: The Interloper
In this, from the novel due out March 12 from Thomas Dunne Books (St.
Martin's Press), the famous wine critic encounters his worst nightmare.
(For earlier excerpts, go to Post Coitum (2/2/13) and Cotton (1/13/13).
(For earlier excerpts, go to Post Coitum (2/2/13) and Cotton (1/13/13).
An hour and twenty minutes later after the tasting began, Clyde Craven-Jones
leans back in his wheeled throne and sighs. Nine bottles down, and not a clear
winner. He thinks he knows who made half of them, and can come close to
guessing the rest. Two hover in the mid- to-upper teens of his twenty-point
ranking system, which will make their investors moderately happy, but no
ecstasy in this tasting. If the mystery wine’s among them, then it’s merely
good.
The brown wrapping paper disguised
the last bottle, emblazoned with the number 10, the poured wine in the Riedel
deeply hued. He pulls the glass to him, picks it up by the stem and quickly,
deftly twists his wrist, driving the wine high up the sides. Its concentrated
fragrance reaches him even from that distance. He dips his nose directly into
the invisible pool of inspiration and inhales. He’s impressed by the wine’s
power, and annoyed: surely this is not the mystery bottle, which means he
failed to detect the interloper among the previous nine. He scribbles “...
barely ripe black fruit... toasty... a lean, shimmering nimbus of cassis.”
He takes a mouthful and holds it
for a moment, lips parted, drawing air in over the wine, then closes his mouth
and, without swallowing, exhales through the nose, pushing the sacred “ether of
harvest and extracted oak,” as he often puts it in his lectures, back out
through his nostrils, with a surprising result. He’ll describe it as
“reverberating cabernet bells.” St.
Paul’s? Too grandiose. A chapel? Too parochial. This wine tolls on the nose with all the
power and precision of Christopher Wren’s gem, the Church of Mary Le Bow...
If you can fully appreciate that complex melody you’re not Cockney, you’re
enchanted!
He swallows, the cascading flavors
identifiable, married in an onslaught of what he thinks of as the essence of Bordeaux, not California
– elegant, balanced, with a long trail on the palate that dwindles into the soothing convergence of light and shadow
in a distant clearing... Yes, that will do nicely. The wine might well be
one of Bordeaux’s
best, from a first-growth estate, introduced as a joke. Detectable tannins, but
overall so silky as to be forgiven. Less heat around the gums, meaning
relatively low alcohol.
It could represent the glory of France, but the initial, decisive burst of fruit
and lingering ripeness has the power of California.
Has someone finally managed to make a wine in the valley with the contradictory
merits of France and America, or is
this a con? If so, it’s near the top of the chart and worth a great deal of
money.
He takes a fistful of popcorn and
crams it into his mouth, snowing all over his sweats. Now for the sobering
second swallow, the true test. He tears the wrapper off the bottle and is
confronted by a column of dark liquid in generic glass; that he has no idea
whose this wine is or where it came from is humiliating. A wine critic without
self-confidence is - how did he put it at the Friends of Wine lecture in San Francisco the week
before? - in the evening of his being.
In the frenzy of stripping No. 10
he has upset No. 6, spilling inky cabernet over the white table cloth. He
attempts to mop it up with the wrapping paper, without success. More tearing to
expose the other bottles, an array of family and fanciful names - Eagle Ridge,
Block 69, Trifecta, Copernicus. He knows them all and he knows their makers;
No. 10 is indeed the interloper.
CJ confronts the wreckage of his
tasting, takes another swallow: Ah, is there anything better than a glass of
fine red wine of an afternoon? Well, of a morning, actually. He can feel the
alcohol now, not just No. 10’s but the collective onslaught of the wines he has
absorbed despite spitting, a hazard of his profession.
He peruses his notes. Numbers 2 and
5 - Block 69, and Trifecta - are clearly the stand-outs, after No. 10. What
comes next is tricky. He stands and pads to the hallway door, opens it a crack,
softly whistles. Then, “Missy.”
A scrabble of claws on heartwood
Doug fir, a blur of brindle hair ejecting from the bedroom, smiling if a
mastiff can be said to smile, her soft brown eyes full of anticipation. He
reaches down and digs his fingertips into her wiry coat, but the dog brushes
past him.
CJ eases the door shut and returns
to the disarray of the tasting. Bracing himself with one hand, he slowly
kneels, groaning, and places the two winners on the floor while Missy watches,
a timeless scene: dog, master, quarry, older than history.
“Go!”
Missy creeps forward and
tentatively smells each glass in turn. She settles on Trifecta.
“Back!”
She obeys, still eying the glasses
as if they might take flight, and waits while he crawls forward, carefully
blocking her view. He replaces Block 69 with No. 10. If Missy picks the mystery
wine, this will compliment his olfactory abilities since she’s infallible, and
very close to his own palate.
He crawls out of the way, sweeping
aside wine-soaked wrapping paper and dropped pencils. Spilled wine drips
through the crack between the leaves in the table; popcorn litters the carpet.
“Go!”
Used to the drill, Missy sniffs at
Trifecta, then at the interloper, hesitates, and stays with the nameless wine.
“Ah,” says CJ proudly, since it’s his choice, too. He has to remind himself -
down on all fours himself - that this colleague is, after all, just an animal.
Next: Glass Act
Next: Glass Act
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Post coitum
An excerpt from the novel, due March 12 from Thomas Dunne Books (St. Martin's Press), in which the famous wine critic is challenged:
Claire rose on one elbow, exhaled,
and said with a smile, “Well, BTDT,” a jocularity intended to make her husband
feel better about his, well, supine performance. True, he had been there, but
he hadn’t done that. No matter; the day beckoned. “Anything special in the
line-up?”
“Yes, you’re going to be challenged
today, CJ. By this valley’s own. Nine cabernets in the up bunch,” which meant
costing at least one hundred and thirty dollars a bottle.
“Why not ten cabernets?” It was the
usual arrangement of American grands crus.
“Well, the tenth one’s a mystery.
No label, nothing. I want to include it because it seems special and has been
around for a bit. Arrived in a lovely cedar box, wrapped in a Pashmina shawl.”
Those things meant nothing.
Vintners spend small fortunes encapsulating mediocre wine in a way that makes
it seem of a higher order, the same logic used for building their expensive
houses and wineries. Packaging, like labels, was deception. One of his duties
as a premier wine critic – the
premier wine critic, he liked to think - was to out deception in Craven-Jones on Wine, with its
pass-along readership of, he often insisted, more than a million. “How did it
get here?”
“By hand, that’s all we know.”
Why hadn’t the dog alerted them?
Clyde Craven-Jones didn’t allow wine to be left on his doorstep; only the most
audacious – or stupid – would attempt it. But he was curious, and any worthy
critic welcomes the random chance to test his mettle. Besides, Claire had gone
to the trouble of including it. “Let’s begin.”
Solemnly launching himself into a
roll, the massive, custom-made bed protesting feebly, his wife nimbly getting
out of the way. She went into the bathroom and he heard water filling a tub
designed for corpulence beyond the American standard, with special handles for
easing himself in and out. He thought he caught a trace of something floral –
tansy? camellia? His policy was no manufactured fragrances of any sort in the
house, perfume being the worst, an assault fraught with plant renderings and
mysterious chemical compounds that gave him an immediate migraine and affected
his ability to taste. He demanded plain soap for his morning immersion, baking
soda for his toothbrush, an electric razor for the graying scrim of beard
accenting copious, signature jowls.
In team velour sweats – a gift from a wine distributor,
unsolicited but comfy – and rope-soled espadrilles, Clyde Craven-Jones moves
with deliberation from his boudoir to a hallway lined with cheaply-framed
photographs of himself with every personage in the wine world who matters,
among them two of his late countrymen, noble, modest scholars of the grape and
fine practitioners of the English language, both dead now.
He’s the last of the ranking Brits and long
ago succumbed to the allure of the New World,
with its lack of ceremony, its un-blinkered heat that even in the straw-hued
mirage of summer he finds preferable to the damp determinism of his native
land.
And, of course, the California wines
themselves: heavily extracted, endowed with strangely-scented variants that his
English colleagues found perverse but he has come to admire for their richness
and power. He’s responsible for much of that intensity, favoring in his reviews
those cabernets and pinot noirs with some flesh on their bones, much to the
disgust of the French who have been made to compete with California and what’s
sometimes called “the Craven-Jones style,” lest they languish on shelves
absorbing light and drying out like old men abandoned in a sauna.
He pushes open the door. The organ
that matters most to him – that distinctive protuberance bigger than other
men’s, more sensitive, gifted, in fact, beyond the bounds of ordinary human
perceptiveness – his nose, has guts of its own. Also the ability to raise its
lucky owner to the top of his profession and into the company of some of the
wealthiest, most talented, sometimes most reprehensible people on earth, an
appendage so remarkable in it has appeared in the pages of a leading
newsweekly: slightly hooked, increasingly veiny, near-infallible.
The former dining room is heavily
draped, temperature controlled, with overhead tract lighting, racks of Riedel
glasses in every imaginable contortion for concentrating aromas, open cartons
of wine, unlined writing pads, 3B drawing pencils - no pens! - a sterling
spitting bucket with splash guard, and, on the white tablecloth, ten bottles
neatly wrapped in brown paper by his obliging wife and numbered by her current
assistant, the perpetually distracted James. One of a procession of helpers in love
with wine, soon disabused of the notion that caddying for the critic is a
spiritual pastime, he has removed the foils and poured an equal amount of wine
from each bottle into a stemmed glass elegantly constricted at the rim.
CJ pauses, slightly elevating his
nostrils, priming them with a barely perceptible twitch, angling in the
direction of the sideboard. He has detected an alien odor among the familiar
ones. Ah, the felt pen, left behind with the top off, the acrid smell emanating
from evaporating ink. “Ja-hames!”
The door swings open and in steps
the ingratiating amanuensis. In Bordeaux he
would be wearing, at the very least, a buttoned-up shirt, but in California it’s
open-necked rugby-style, with jeans: the uniform. Fuzz on the chin, smiling -
everyone in California
smiles - the young man’s big, brown eyes denoting apprehension. “What’s up,
CJ?”
“The Magic Marker’s up, James.”
“Shit. Sorry about that.”
James scoops it up, smacks the cap
in place and goes back through the revolving door. A handsome lad, maybe a tad
too handsome, chastened but overdue for remaindering; has Claire found
something of value in James beyond his ability to heft wine cartons, open
bottles, and run the dishwasher? (No detergent!) But now Craven-Jones is distracted
by the right smells: cabernet sauvignon’s infinity of masked components, its
glorious potential enhanced by caresses of cabernet franc, petite verdot,
merlot, even malbec, as well as oak and the panoply of botanical associations
that push all else from his mind and bring to his palate an anticipatory
wetness.
Almost daintily he takes his chair
and eyes the delectable prey. The tease before the main event, the vinous
equivalent of a naked woman walking around a boxing ring holding aloft a
placard with a number on it. Where are the muscles and firm flesh, where the
flab? Who will have the up-front power and fruit, who the longest finish in
this match-up of potential champions? Sports references are absolutely
necessary for communication in this, his chosen country, but CJ knows little of
sport beyond the terrible memories of rugby in the damp desolation of his Midlands preparatory school. Metaphorically, he favors
sumo wrestling: enormous combatants pushing at each other, stately, powerful.
At his elbow sits a cut-glass bowl
full of air-popped corn, sans butter
and salt, the perfect palate cleanser: weightless mopper-up of all vestiges of
sampled wine. The popcorn’s smell reminds CJ of his gnawing hunger, to be put
off until lunch, which today will commence with wafer-thin sole fillets over
which scalding French butter has been poured, no other cooking required,
complemented by a slightly chilled Puligny-Montrachet.
He’s getting ahead of himself;
dining follows due labor, the reigning Craven-Jones maxim. Meanwhile no flaw
shall pass this nose, these lips, this palate, without detection, no
short-coming shall go unannounced in what Claire calls his doomsday book, Craven-Jones on Wine, printed on actual
paper, with a paid circulation of one hundred and twenty thousand and a
pass-along influence of, yes, a million. Craven-Jones
on Wine often breaks, as well as makes, reputations, vintages, business
deals, marriages, even lives. Such is his power and, of course, his burden.
Ready now, nasal chambers cleared
with a mild saline solution, his copiousness fondly settled into the
custom-made, re-enforced rolling chair set high enough to prevent his having to
bend his knees, he passes flared nostrils over the glasses first, guessing the
species of oak from which the barrels were made that until recently held these
gems. Limoge? Alliere. My God, Arkansas!
He will soon know exactly who made the wines and how long the fruit hung on the
vines, the blend, the barrel regimen, the fining agent, and how well they sell
on the futures market depends upon his evaluation.
He picks up a glass by the stem and
angles it, examining the color against the white table cloth. Deeply mauve,
cabernet’s own depthless version of purple, concentrated to the rim. Ah, these New World hues. His fellow Brits reeled in their
presence, but CJ came to love them as a deliverer from the anonymous life of
bottle drudge in the chilly cellars of Lily & Sons, Ltd., City of London, scribbling reviews
for the firm’s news-sheet, before he branched out under a pseudonym.
Compressing now one nostril with a
forefinger and passing the glass under the other, he inhales deeply. The
olfactory equivalent of matins in a village chapel go off in a brain inculcated
with associations: black cherries, currents, brambles, lanolin, tobacco, cedar,
chocolate. But also flaws: blatant woodiness – it’s well known that Clyde
Craven-Jones disapproves of harsh tannins – and a good but hardly spectacular
finish.
He ejects a purple stream into the
bowl, scribbles “gobs of fruit. . . too-rapid falling off on the middle palate.
. . predictable,” and moves on to the next bottle.
Next: The interloper