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A review by cocoonofbooks
The Grail: A Year Ambling & Shambling Through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wild World by Mary Miller Doyle, Brian Doyle
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.