Mice choose red over white

 The good doctor's latest proof that drinking is good for you:
                                                                       

Drinking red wine gives longer lives to . . .mice. And likely people. According to a new study at Harvard Medical School there is now "conclusive evidence" that the red wine compound resveratrol directly activates a protein that promotes health in animals. The research showed that mice on resveratrol have twice the endurance and are relatively immune to effects of obesity and aging. Scientists have focused for the past decade on sirtuins, a group of genes that are believed to protect mammals against disease and aging. And evidence has been mounting that resveratrol increases the activity of a specific sirtuin, SIRT1. Some scientists contended the findings were flawed. This latest research, however, uncovered the molecular mechanism for the interaction. In addition to red wine, resveratrol is found in peanuts and berries, which are not as much fun and can stick to your teeth.
                                                                                                                   Doc Lang

To order my novel, Nose, please 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

To see my bio click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

Some origins of the novel

Water Into Wine, Wine Into…Fiction

Posted by James Conaway on March 7, 2013

(0)

Share on email More »

                                          (Photograph by Steve Garfield)

It began with an offer to write a wine column for the Washington Post, way back — a whim with benefits. It became a lot more: not just a pleasant way to learn, but also an ascent – descent? – into a subculture as broad as the Earth and as deep as history itself.
Wine’s complexity, I learned, was greater than I imagined, with chemical components that actually justified descriptors like “buttery” and “briary.”
And I learned that wine’s origins are closely aligned with our own. Making and selling the stuff, for one thing, must be at least the world’s third oldest profession.


     Photo by Peter Menzel

An ongoing interest in wine inevitably entails close encounters with stunning landscapes and fascinating people. A mere interest in wine broadens the traveler in unique ways and enriches any trip that touches on it. Nowadays that means not just visiting some part of the global vineyard, but also sharing in the rich social heritage of this ancient tradition.
Wine making and the people who do it have changed in recent years. Nowadays to own a winery means belonging to an international trade with great bona fides, as well as sharing some traits of an ancient European royalty dedicated to quality and culture.
As a budding wine enthusiast who wrote about wine, I found myself involved in wine’s sometimes all-too-human side — where, beyond mere sensory perception, a constant battle is waged for good reviews and scores, higher “price-points,” and increased sales.
This dawned on me when I came to Napa, like everybody else, to see what the fuss was all about and came away convinced that the valley contained a true American subculture.
This was unique then in the U.S, which came relatively late to an appreciation of fine wine. Eventually I wrote two nonfiction books about it – Napa, and The Far Side of Eden – but even then there was much I still hadn’t divulged, including my own ideas about how landed families are affected by the sudden notoriety successful wine-making can bring. And how a suddenly coveted – and priceless – locale can see the destruction of farmland upon which its reputation is built.
That included epic battles over preserving the place itself, and larger-than-life characters straight out of America’s Gilded Age colliding with environmental proponents, a classic American story that is now taking place all over the world.
Each wine-producing region teaches its own lessons to visitors, and for those striving to write about it, and I eventually came to the realization that fiction has advantages over journalism when dealing with this world.
Novels give free reign to the imagination and allow surprising and quite wonderful revelations to surface have sat unexpressed for years. This is because they either defy documentation or involve intensely private relationships that only a novel can do justice to.
The result, in my case, was a novel called Nose that began to flow unexpectedly from my computer over a year ago as I sat alone on the couch with a view of Napa’s rugged Mayacamas mountain range in front of me.
My life hasn’t been the same since, and after it’s published next week, I intend to plunge back into the depthless pool of wine-related fiction. In fact, I already have.
Featured contributor James Conaway writes for National Geographic Traveler and other publications devoted to travel, history, and culture. Read more on his wine blog.

To order my novel please 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

To see my bio click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

Reviews and events

Reviews:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/463582813
http://www.bookish.com/authors/james-conaway/7351527e-55da-47e9-9644-0a58b4b7d865
http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/james-conaway

 Events:
http://napavalleyregister.com/star/business/conaway-to-discuss-newest-book-nose-at-library/article_be9d11e4-82b5-11e2-ae8e-0019bb2963f4.html

http://www.politics-prose.com/event/book/james-conaway-nose
http://www.raymondvineyards.com/cms/events/

Here's a guilty review of Nose

http://guiltlessreading.blogspot.ca/2013/02/nose-by-james-conaway.html

The crush party

To order my novel please 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

To see my bio click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

   
Excerpted from Nose, to be released by St. Martin's Press on March 12 but available now:

     Turning into the Hutt Family Estate, the renowned wine critic, Clyde Craven-Jones found himself gently insinuated from the twenty-first into the nineteenth century: manicured gravel drive, big, dappling live oaks obscuring the electronic surveillance cameras, a heavy-gage steel gate matching the white wooden fence, and vines trellised in the old manner, with red and white roses planted at the row ends. Beyond stood Jerome Hutt’s prized walnut trees, another living tribute to the past, the trunks painted a correct historic white, and a prune grove deep in shadow.

    A dozen rows of wheat stood beyond that, a demonstration plot for wine enthusiasts enamored of the authenticity of diverse agriculture. School children brought up regularly from the city could see what the valley had looked like when recent European immigrants lived here and nourished their crops with the natural bounty of roaming livestock. As if summoned by these expectations, sheep waded belly-deep in native blue stem grass, bright as sunlit cumulus. A signboard built by a cabinet-maker had been erected next to the driveway stating in tasteful gold leaf: The Hutt family seeks to preserve what is best and most lasting in the valley, and to keep it free of the discord of our modern world. Our uncompromising goal is to produce harmony in a special place, and a wine – Copernicus - of such exceptional quality that it will live and nourish generations to come.

    Not mentioned was the fact that the place had been a calf-and-cow operation of great squalor when Hutt purchased it. The rancher had filled the streambed with trash and grease-stained, axle-sprung tractors, threatened tourists trying to turn around in his rutted road, and had to be evicted by the sheriff after firing a bullet through the side of his own pickup. The original house had been demolished and replaced with the beautiful confection now coming into view, a perfect if greatly out-sized replica of a Victorian farmstead, with period siding, a long porch behind rampant rosemary, and guest quarters cleverly disguised as a California water tower. The handsome weathered barn, with its big hay boom and unsullied horse stalls, cleverly designed, massively built, fronted a thoroughly modern winery set into the hill.

    Guests in formal attire disembarked from large cars and smaller European jobs, eager for the annual party, and processed into the winery, under the big, unused hay boom. Alysssa Hutt reigned over the receiving line, turning and beaming upon each in turn, a sustained benignity bestowed upon whatever passed before her. Perfect teeth, not too white, ever so slightly varied, lent verisimilitude to one of the finest assemblages of resin and supporting platinum in the valley. And the set of Alyssa’s shoulders, at right angles to the earth, seemed unaffected by gravity, steely foundations under soft skin from which hung, in protuberant conformity, two large breasts perfectly constructed for both cleavage and levitation which she had not possessed when her husband first met her, sweeping up toward the broad overhang of generous, surgically modulated jaw line. “CJ!”

    About to impart a secret, coming closer so that he caught a hint of breath freshener and glimpsed light reflected from a thin metallic plate inserted behind one pale blue iris. Jerome Hutt stood on the far side of the room, as far from his wife as he could get, turning that low, Australopithecine brow of his from guest to guest, his purposefully old-fashioned cut-away coat and elegant tie appropriate to the past but not to the present.

    CJ knew most of the people in this room and even liked a few. But others had been transformed as Alyssa Hutt had, the old personalities, and bonds, shed like chrysalises, gazing at the platters of hand-massaged, grass-fed beef, the phalanxes of dark bottles. He was touched by a sadness deeply rooted in family and departed friends, and drained his glass. Ordinarily he would have merely sampled the wine, and almost never did he pick up a fresh glass as he did now.

    Annoyed by the tightness of his jacket - only Americans could require evening dress at five in the afternoon – he impulsively took the arm of Tina Schupe, Jerome Hutt’s publicist and a woman whose looks dominated most gatherings. Requisitely blonde, modish in a blue-black sheath, fetching despite the drift of old acne scars, Tina was smarter than most people she dealt with and she looked at him in surprise. Clyde Craven-Jones wasn’t in the habit of approaching flacks. “Well hi, CJ.”

     “Any of that new blend around?” A mischievous ploy, but CJ was feeling his oats.

    “What new blend?”

     An unidentified wine had arrived at CJ’s house in a Pashmina shawl, an act that had Tina Schupe written all over it, and rated a perfect score. But she was too shrewd to take credit outright, if credit was due. Before CJ could respond he found himself bracketed by two vintners, the de facto Franco-American emissary from Champagne, and the beefy oldest son of one of the first families of the valley who wore a brocade vest that lent him a Barnum-and-Bailey touch, entirely appropriate, CJ thought. “Kind of woody, huh?” he asked conspiratorially, as if he and CJ shared an appreciation of subtle tannins. “I think Jerome pulled a little too much oak out of those barrels, don’t you?”

    But CJ made it a point never to discuss the wine at hand in a social setting. He watched Tina move across the room like a ceramic blade through oven-warmed Brie and lean close to Hutt, the long-standing intimacy between them impossible to miss. No tougher operator in the valley than Tina Schupe. She drank bourbon instead of wine, without excuse, yet in Hutt’s presence she softened, the two of them surrounded by the non plus ultra of valley society, and whispered something. Hutt looked at CJ across the room and raised his glass.

    God, what an incestuous world it has become, CJ thought, and what a wonderful one. The existence of hermetic American wine nobility rising in his lifetime, in part on his broad shoulders, was still a source of pride. Thirty years ago there would have been real farmers here, ruddy-faced men not in tuxedoes but in lumpy jackets and their friendly wives enjoying a party, companionable and full of advice for new-comers. Today, the burnished complexions all belonged to golfers and mountain-scramblers, to wine-besotted inheritors and hyper-developers, all connection to the land tenuous and filtered through immigrants who lived close to the source and did all the work.

    Seeking relief, CJ turned to the heavy doors at his elbow that led to the caves and the winery and on impulse leaned on an iron handle cast as merry Bacchus. He found himself in the deserted private tasting room, before a long table made of some South American tree, and he pushed through another set of doors and into the winery itself, suddenly engulfed in the smells of wet stone and fermentation, primal and still oddly thrilling after all these years.

    He started across the concrete floor toward the winery exit, stepping over big rubber hoses nuzzling stainless steel tanks like serpents out of Grimm. Once outside, he could call Claire on his cell phone, and escape, but now he was drawn to the towering, double-jacketed monoliths silently coursing with glycol that soothed the microbial rage of the microbes. Climate control kept the whole place cool as a mausoleum.

On his right rose the steel superstructure from which the wines’ progress could be monitored, impervious to earthquakes. It had been years since CJ had last looked down into the maelstrom of nascent wine. Suddenly he missed the innocence of his early days in the business, wanted to go back and sweep beards of mold from old bottles in Europe, to knock the tops off magnums of bubbly with a cavalry sword and lie hung-over on a bench in the Reims railway station, to spit first-growth Medoc onto crushed marble, and to sip Margaret River chardonnay while watching kangaroos slip eerily through the forest south of Perth. And, of course, to make love to the impetuous wife of a vintner, on her grass tennis court not two miles from where CJ now stood. Things had been much easier in those days, especially at the mere one hundred and ninety pounds he then weighed.

    CJ placed his glass on a tread and a hand on the railing and heaved himself up to the catwalk. An adventure. Take it slow; there was a cane in CJ’s immediate future, he knew, but had resisted out of vanity. He moved forward and at random chose a handle on hinged steel and, with a grunt, pulled up the trap door. Here the smell was strongest: bramble and jam and the acrid plume of alcohol. The hatch slipped from his hand and collided with the tank, bringing a mournful echo from the far end of the winery, and CJ looked down into thousands of gallons of dense red liquid. A scummy blanket floated on the top, the fermentation complete. Calculating quickly, he estimated that the tank’s contents were worth a million dollars, more or less, a handsome return for Hutt. Incredible in fact.

    He thought he heard a door close, then nothing. A sanctity in this dimness, humming compressors, softly keening computers measuring temperature in bright, ever shifting liquid numerals, other-worldly, unspeakably expensive. He felt a mischievous elation: CJ was a journalist, after all. It had been a long time since he had looked deeply into any wine not in a stemmed glass. If Hutt was faking the culling of his harvest, or making a small lot of mystery cabernet, perhaps he was also manipulating it in these resplendent tanks, but the view down into this one was of darkness.

    Bending over, he pushed his face through the wide portal. Clyde Craven-Jones was not above experiencing anew the rawness of the hallowed process, but he was touched by unexpected fear of falling. He pulled away, the stem of his glasses catching on the edge, and they dropped.

    “You oaf!”

    He could see them in the gloom, hanging from a baffle blade above the priceless vat of wine. The glasses were almost weightless, thin frames and graduated lenses supposed to lend him an air of authority. Cursing, he lay flat against the smooth tank top and thrust one arm downward. The gap was too great. So he maneuvered his right arm and shoulder into the portal, already hearing his wife’s complaints about his soiled jacket, but even with his cheek pressed to cold steel he couldn’t quite reach them. No option but to grope his way back to the reception, but his pride - and fear of embarrassment - forced him to try again.

    One shoulder all the way into the tank, the rest of him shutting out light, the closeness of the tank’s interior oppressing, CJ stretched. He touched the thin edge of one lens but, at that moment, his feet shot upward out of the black dress shoes that hurt his ankles so he had left them loosely tied. “Goddamn it!” he bellowed, the words thrumming off the steel cylinder as he watched the dislodged spectacles sink into primordial ooze.

Head and arm firmly inside now, the other elbow wedged between him and unforgiving metal, America’s greatest wine critic was dangerously cantilevered, teetering like a seesaw and lacking strength to right himself. He couldn’t fall through - abdomen and buttocks prevented that - but neither could he escape without help. But his cell phone, a hard knot against his hip, was on the wrong side of the hatchway, and to reach it he would have to release his grip on the edge, twist to the left, and work that hand up crab-wise along his meandering mid-rift.

    He tried, recalling the line: The probity of a wine critic is inversely related to the size of his waist. What idiot said that? Some people are more disposed to flesh than others. “Everybody” – screaming, surprising himself – “doesn’t jog!”

    He touched the phone at last. Candy bar model, not a flipper, small mercy. Grope the polyester. Where’s that redial button? But his shoulder slipped and he found himself up-ended, one hand gripping the baffles, the other in new wine still warm and sticky. CJ gasped, his face infinitely heavy, suddenly back in boarding school, under ghostly white goalposts, smelling rank grass as his face is thrust into the earth by beastly rugby players. Make the air last, he thought, a winery’s never empty for long at crush time. They’ll come for you. Ignore that fearful heart, abide with dignity and watch the lovely spears of light in that dark pool.

 

Clyde Craven-Jones would have loved this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/world/europe/oxford-and-cambridge-battle-it-out-in-wine-tasting-contest.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 

(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:  

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)

       

   

 

 

  

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"

Click here: http://bit.ly/10IT7SJ

 _____________________________________________________________________________

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:  

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

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.

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:

                                                              

        "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

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:  

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

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:

Les Breeden walked along the river, watching the tide go out. The little park was deserted except for two deeply suntanned men with bundles of clothes under their butts, contemplating mud flats. Les found his way blocked by what he thought was a fast food shack until he saw half a dozen stools on a sawdust floor, seemingly at odds with the name stenciled on the door, 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.”

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

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"

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).  

                                                            

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