The real blog you're reading now grew out of a fictional one in my novel of the same name. It was a plot device and the author in Nose is Les Breeden, an out-of-work journalist. Here's Les's first, liberating (and quite fictional) effort:
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 bull 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, of lifestyle vintneramuses and celebrity auction addicts buying matched sets of jeroboams of old Dripping Ridge cabernet.
All passé. Forget numerical ratings and the latest Two-Buck Suck, 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, now sputtering musical, “Manifest Destiny.”
So just log on, kick back, and sniff... sniff...
My version of blogging serves as a series of personal journalistic forays into subjects I'm interested in, not just people intimately involved in wine, and wines in their own right, but also travel, culture in the broader sense, and the on-going struggle to preserve the natural - and parts of the built - world.
Nose also serves as a compendium of my past work, going way back. If you scroll down through the months and years to the right you can read what I've written about many things, from wine and environmental concerns in the Napa Valley to the logging of the Tongass National Forest to AIDS in Nepal to pinot noir in New Zealand to magical realism in Sicily.
All my books listed below are available immediately at Napa Bookmine in the city of Napa, so if you want to thumb through a real book, just go down to Pearl Street.
To order Nose click on:
To order Nose click on:
For newly released earlier titles go to:
http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm, and for my book of travel essays go to:
To see my bio, click on:
http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2014/09/heres-my-new-bio.html
You can contact me at: conawayjim@gmail.com
You can contact me at: conawayjim@gmail.com
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