The Grail
Brian Doyle
Line drawings by Mary Miller Doyle.
From the red clay hills of Dundee, Oregon, come increasingly world-renowned pinot noir wines. After being startled and delighted by one winery's elixir, and the shaggy humor of the father and son who made it, Brian Doyle set out to spend a year in one Willamette Valley vineyard, chronicling the creative and chaotic labor as the winemakers chase after the perfect pinot noir.
A self-described "wine doofus," Doyle follows closely at the elbow of Jesse Lange, son of Lange Winery founder Don Lange, peppering the young winemaker with questions about the growing of grapes and making of wine. With dry wit and otherworldly patience, Jesse Lange offers his interlocutor a primer on pinot, describing how acres of tiny black grapes are turned into complex and superb wines.
Doyle is absorbed in the real work of winemaking, "the sheer labor of it, the creativity, the dust, the bugs, the machinery, the botany, the chemistry, the wild nuttiness of trying to make a great wine." He records the rhythms and cycles of winemaking: the fallow times, the times of wild energy, and always the worry about the precious crop.
Doyle serves as a cheerful tour guide through the world of wine, alert to the colorful and riveting stories that swirl around its creation and consumption. In The Grail, he collects and shares dozens of these stories about the natural history of the vineyard, the fussiness of the pinot vine, the boom in pinot noir around the world, the surprising buying habits of tasting room visitors, and the subtle craft of winemakers who know, as Jesse Lange says, grinning, "how to get out of the way of great grapes." In short, The Grail is a spirited and entertaining chase for a truly special wine.
About the author
Brian Doyle (1956-2017) was the author of many books, including the novels Mink River and The Plover; The Grail, his account of a year in a pinot noir vineyard in Oregon; and The Wet Engine, a memoir about his infant son’s heart surgery and the young doctor who saved his life. He edited Portland Magazine at the University of Portland.
Read more about this author
"Like the wine Doyle writes of, these recollections are layered with subtlety and depth… Perfect for wine aficionados and word lovers, this is a full-bodied, ebullient account."
I have been delighted to be published by a university press for many reasons, some of them egregiously selfish, like a superb editor who let my headlong style alone and only caught my many errors and narrative crimes; but the deepest reason has nothing to do with finally getting to vote on my own book covers, or the immediate and personable response I get to the usual authorial neurotic wheedling and mania. It has something very much to do with community, and with responsibility to the stories that matter, and with giving children of all ages in my region the best opportunity to encounter and digest and savor stories they would never get in any other way than the graceful way they are celebrated by university presses. The university press that publishes me, bless its taste and discernment, is consciously and deliberately and happily a regional press. It takes its place in the community quite seriously. It wishes to catch and share history here. It wishes to sing and salute the natural world, which is to say our neighbors of all species. It wishes to speak clearly and eloquently of the moist grace of this place, and no other, for I believe its visionaries know full well that if this press does not speak those stories they will be lost. I have great respect for commercial presses of all sorts; to recruit and promulgate story is generally a positive thing in this universe, and those men and women who bet their livelihoods on publishing are brave souls. But I have a higher respect for university presses, when they turn their capacious talents and resources to communal responsibility and not merely the driest of academic ephemera. To live well in a place is to be a student of its character and characters, its stories and tales, its tumultuous life and stunning possibilities; if we do not share stories of what we were and who we can be, we are merely visitors in a region, not residents. It seems to me that university presses like the one that publishes me are most attuned to story as, no kidding, no exaggeration, food for the soul, both individual and civic. They tell the stories that would not be told otherwise; and the fact that my university press is backed and supported and encouraged by a university that is, in the final analysis, in the business of waking lanky children to their best and most generous and creative selves is doubly cheering.