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pattydsf's review against another edition
4.0
“For all that so many of us drink wine and buy wine and read about wine and make gifts of wine to each other and visit wineries and vineyards and see movies about wine and talk pseudoknowledgeable about wine, very few of us, it seems to me, have the faintest notion of how grapes get to be glee in the glass.”
I picked up this book because it is by Brian Doyle. Although you can’t tell by my list of books here, I really like Doyle’s writing. I have encountered his poetry and essays before in a number of publications. Most of what I have read by him is about faith, so I was intrigued by this book. I wasn’t sure that writing about the best pinot noir in the world was the same as writing about religion and spirituality.
I should not have been surprised that some of this book resembles Doyle’s other writings. His way of writing is obviously a big part of him and so the style of this book and other things I have read are similar. And that is a big part of why I liked this treatise on wine.
By the time I was halfway through these short, pithy stories/essays, I was in love with the Lange vineyard, Oregon, and the world of viticulture. I felt like I was with Doyle when he took his monthly visit to Dundee, Oregon. I started to read the book more slowly so that I could spend more time in this delightful place. A place I would have never found on my own or seen quite so clearly without Doyle’s writing.
If you enjoy wine, if you enjoy good writing or if you like to travel to places outside of your neck of the woods, give this book a try. I hope you are as pleased with your visit to the Lange winery as I am.
I picked up this book because it is by Brian Doyle. Although you can’t tell by my list of books here, I really like Doyle’s writing. I have encountered his poetry and essays before in a number of publications. Most of what I have read by him is about faith, so I was intrigued by this book. I wasn’t sure that writing about the best pinot noir in the world was the same as writing about religion and spirituality.
I should not have been surprised that some of this book resembles Doyle’s other writings. His way of writing is obviously a big part of him and so the style of this book and other things I have read are similar. And that is a big part of why I liked this treatise on wine.
By the time I was halfway through these short, pithy stories/essays, I was in love with the Lange vineyard, Oregon, and the world of viticulture. I felt like I was with Doyle when he took his monthly visit to Dundee, Oregon. I started to read the book more slowly so that I could spend more time in this delightful place. A place I would have never found on my own or seen quite so clearly without Doyle’s writing.
If you enjoy wine, if you enjoy good writing or if you like to travel to places outside of your neck of the woods, give this book a try. I hope you are as pleased with your visit to the Lange winery as I am.
dcmr's review against another edition
1.0
I should have read the title more closely; this book is a lot of "ambling." The writing style is chatty, the prose flabby, and there's just too much of the author in every line. I'm an Oregonian enthusiastic about Oregon wines, and this book is a sad disappointment.
katebelt's review against another edition
5.0
Ambling and shambling is a good description of this book. I deem it quintessential Boyle and quintessential Oregon. Sometimes the writing carries you along like floating down a quiet stream and other times it's more like going over the rapids. This one will have to do me until his novel set in Chicago comes out next March.
cocoonofbooks's review
3.0
I'm erring on the side of generosity with this rating because I'm not a person who enjoys wine and I might have liked the book more if I was, and also because I've read enough of Doyle's work to find his style a bit wearisome, which is not necessarily the case for someone who hasn't read him before. This is a collection of short chapters that, in the end, share a year in the life of a winery in Oregon, specifically the Lange Estate Winery & Vineyards in the Dundee Hills. I'm sure that if I had any interest in alcoholic drinks, this book would prompt in me an interest to visit this winery or, at the very least, to try some of their wine.
The book contains a lot of conversations between Doyle and the winery's 26-year-old manager (all without quotation marks and captured via notebook rather than recorder, so you can only assume they aren't verbatim), some rambling musings about life and nature as he sits among the rows of the vineyard or watching the vineyard's employees at work, and occasional snippets of history about winemaking and particularly about pinot noir. He isn't entirely concerned with accuracy or consistency — he starts one chapter by saying that there's no agreement about the origins of the pinot noir vine, but here are several theories, and another chapter later on saying that the vine, which originated in such-and-such place... I found it annoying the way he refers to his wife as his "subtle research assistant" and generally found his references to women and sex uncomfortable. The thing that's most exasperating about Doyle's writing, though, is how much of it consists of nothing but making lists — lists of the equipment found on the grounds of the winery, lists of the places pinot noir is grown, lists of the flavors you might experience when drinking pinot noir — and these are repeated in different variations several times throughout the book. I think sometimes a list can serve to provide a comprehensive understanding of a place, but when it's used so often it starts to feel like a substitute for doing actual writing — just looking around and naming everything you see.
That said, by the end of the book I did know substantially more than I did before about pinot noir and winemaking, and I do have a sense of the rhythm of the year at a vineyard and winery, which I suppose is what this book was intended to accomplish. I am hesitant to part with my copy of the book, which was signed by the author before his untimely death, and so I'm leaving it at our family's lake house where it will hopefully be read and appreciated by my parents and aunts and uncles who own the house, all of whom live in the Pacific Northwest and share an appreciation for wine. While this wasn't really a book for me, I think readers like them would genuinely enjoy it.
The book contains a lot of conversations between Doyle and the winery's 26-year-old manager (all without quotation marks and captured via notebook rather than recorder, so you can only assume they aren't verbatim), some rambling musings about life and nature as he sits among the rows of the vineyard or watching the vineyard's employees at work, and occasional snippets of history about winemaking and particularly about pinot noir. He isn't entirely concerned with accuracy or consistency — he starts one chapter by saying that there's no agreement about the origins of the pinot noir vine, but here are several theories, and another chapter later on saying that the vine, which originated in such-and-such place... I found it annoying the way he refers to his wife as his "subtle research assistant" and generally found his references to women and sex uncomfortable. The thing that's most exasperating about Doyle's writing, though, is how much of it consists of nothing but making lists — lists of the equipment found on the grounds of the winery, lists of the places pinot noir is grown, lists of the flavors you might experience when drinking pinot noir — and these are repeated in different variations several times throughout the book. I think sometimes a list can serve to provide a comprehensive understanding of a place, but when it's used so often it starts to feel like a substitute for doing actual writing — just looking around and naming everything you see.
That said, by the end of the book I did know substantially more than I did before about pinot noir and winemaking, and I do have a sense of the rhythm of the year at a vineyard and winery, which I suppose is what this book was intended to accomplish. I am hesitant to part with my copy of the book, which was signed by the author before his untimely death, and so I'm leaving it at our family's lake house where it will hopefully be read and appreciated by my parents and aunts and uncles who own the house, all of whom live in the Pacific Northwest and share an appreciation for wine. While this wasn't really a book for me, I think readers like them would genuinely enjoy it.
pattydsf's review
4.0
“For all that so many of us drink wine and buy wine and read about wine and make gifts of wine to each other and visit wineries and vineyards and see movies about wine and talk pseudoknowledgeable about wine, very few of us, it seems to me, have the faintest notion of how grapes get to be glee in the glass.”
I picked up this book because it is by Brian Doyle. Although you can’t tell by my list of books here, I really like Doyle’s writing. I have encountered his poetry and essays before in a number of publications. Most of what I have read by him is about faith, so I was intrigued by this book. I wasn’t sure that writing about the best pinot noir in the world was the same as writing about religion and spirituality.
I should not have been surprised that some of this book resembles Doyle’s other writings. His way of writing is obviously a big part of him and so the style of this book and other things I have read are similar. And that is a big part of why I liked this treatise on wine.
By the time I was halfway through these short, pithy stories/essays, I was in love with the Lange vineyard, Oregon, and the world of viticulture. I felt like I was with Doyle when he took his monthly visit to Dundee, Oregon. I started to read the book more slowly so that I could spend more time in this delightful place. A place I would have never found on my own or seen quite so clearly without Doyle’s writing.
If you enjoy wine, if you enjoy good writing or if you like to travel to places outside of your neck of the woods, give this book a try. I hope you are as pleased with your visit to the Lange winery as I am.
I picked up this book because it is by Brian Doyle. Although you can’t tell by my list of books here, I really like Doyle’s writing. I have encountered his poetry and essays before in a number of publications. Most of what I have read by him is about faith, so I was intrigued by this book. I wasn’t sure that writing about the best pinot noir in the world was the same as writing about religion and spirituality.
I should not have been surprised that some of this book resembles Doyle’s other writings. His way of writing is obviously a big part of him and so the style of this book and other things I have read are similar. And that is a big part of why I liked this treatise on wine.
By the time I was halfway through these short, pithy stories/essays, I was in love with the Lange vineyard, Oregon, and the world of viticulture. I felt like I was with Doyle when he took his monthly visit to Dundee, Oregon. I started to read the book more slowly so that I could spend more time in this delightful place. A place I would have never found on my own or seen quite so clearly without Doyle’s writing.
If you enjoy wine, if you enjoy good writing or if you like to travel to places outside of your neck of the woods, give this book a try. I hope you are as pleased with your visit to the Lange winery as I am.
satyridae's review
4.0
Brian Doyle's is the first byline I learned to look for in the Oregonian when I moved here, and I still get an anticipatory flutter when I see it. He's recently written a novel, [b:Mink River|9250050|Mink River|Brian Doyle|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1285262402s/9250050.jpg|14130561] and I went to Powell's to listen to him talk. He's an insanely intense and achingly vulnerable speaker who laughs and cries at his own stories. I found out then that he has published several books of essays, and I ordered them all from the library. This is the first one I got, and I dove right in.
I love his tumbling run-on enthusiastic wordy true fine style. I love his unabashed love for his family and his species and his planet and his religion and his wine. I love the way he can make me laugh and cry all at once.
This collection of essays follows the course of a year at the Lange Winery in the Dundee Hills of Oregon, and it is a purely lovely journey. Doyle is never absent from any of his essays, he is so mindfully present that you are too. His words roost in my heart and make it gladder. I've ordered a copy of this book for my own library. 4.5 stars.
I love his tumbling run-on enthusiastic wordy true fine style. I love his unabashed love for his family and his species and his planet and his religion and his wine. I love the way he can make me laugh and cry all at once.
This collection of essays follows the course of a year at the Lange Winery in the Dundee Hills of Oregon, and it is a purely lovely journey. Doyle is never absent from any of his essays, he is so mindfully present that you are too. His words roost in my heart and make it gladder. I've ordered a copy of this book for my own library. 4.5 stars.
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