This is the first blog posting I’ve written straight into this slot without any plan for some time, and it sure feels good to be shooting from the hip again. Normally, I’m very cautious of using military or firearm metaphors, but this one fits my subject today (this first day of the so-called New Year of 2105) perfectly, because it’s so fundamentally American, and this really is My American Wine Year.
In fact, My American Wine Year began several months ago after I finished work on BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) / PLANET RIESLING (the German language edition from Tre Torri ). At that point it occurred to me that many of my best stories had either never been written down at all, or at least had never been told in English. Furthermore, nearly all of them took place in America, or had obvious American subjects. They span the entire period from my first eye-popping encounter with the US of A back in 1985, through many years of serious research and some serious craziness along the way, right up to the present. That’s the period during which wine entered mainstream American culture, the US became the world’s biggest wine consuming nation, and its entrepreneurial creativity eclipsed that of almost every competing wine producing nation.
That strikes me as a dynamite combo, and – what good luck! – the ideal basis for an outrageously true book about wine in America. Some new research will be necessary, but not so much that this new year I’ll have to be on the road for months at a go. However, I will be getting as close as possible, not only to the vines and cellars, but most importantly to my human subjects. This method is often called Gonzo Journalism, although you can just as well describe it as off-road deep-immersion, but whatever name you give it, this is the kind of searching for the truth and writing about it that I naturally gravitate to. To my mind, the best book anyone can possibly write is the one that converts their life directly into pages of text, and my goal with this project I’m calling #CBL is to do exactly that with myself immersed in Wine America big time.
It’s a little more than two years since I began spending a lot of time in the US both to intensively research the dramatic recent Riesling developments here (and in Canada) and to write BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH from an American perspective. Along the way I encountered a slew of exciting new wines made from other grape varieties, and many of the winemakers and vineyard locations responsible for them located were way outside the American Wine Box. None of these discoveries was more surprising and exciting than Arizona, which I visited in 2013 and ’14.
The usual reaction from Americans when I mention of vineyards in Arizona is, “it’s way too hot for vines! That’s the desert!” Of course, Phoenix is one of the hottest places in the US and much of Arizona is desert, but this is nowhere near the whole story as the photograph taken by Maynard James Keenan of Caduceus Cellars and Merkin Vineyards in Jerome/AZ today shows. The press trip to Arizona’s vineyards which he, a group of colleagues and Dada PR man David Furer organized in Mid-November was a turning point for my project. Not only did I write some of my best stories for this blog (scroll down and click on “older posts”), it also give me another great subject, and with that the basic plan for the book took much clearer shape. The serious work had begun, and that was seriously exciting: exactly the combination I look for.
Official Warning! : I just completed the first chapter of #CBL and it isn’t only outrageous, but dangerous too. Don’t worry though, this year you won’t be in acute danger, because I won’t complete the manuscript before the last days of August. That means it will be a bit more than a year until it gets out into the big wide world in the form of print on paper an e-book where it can finally cause some real trouble. Then it will carry a parental advisory sticker to prevent harm being done to impressionable young people. The book will be a white-knuckle ride for adult readers and I feel responsible for young people, who are also the wine drinkers of the future. They may have to wait a bit longer to enjoy to the full.
Happy New Year!
