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Brian Doyle has written books in recent years about the human heart, the “wet engine” that keeps us going, in terms of its physical, metaphorical, and archetypal aspects. He has also written about men of creative genius—writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and William Blake, musicians like Van Morrison and Paul Desmond—in an effort to learn how their greatness might teach us all a thing or two about what it takes to be great. At first glance Doyle’s new book, The Grail, a quirky and headlong exploration of pinot noir, might seem to be a total departure from his recent work. But, let’s face it, red wine is widely purported to have positive qualities vis a vis cardiovascular health, and in the right balance the fruit of the vine is clearly good for the spiritual/heart health of the human animal. And it takes human beings of genius to make the stuff well. Though the geography is different, Doyle is treading ground he clearly and dearly loves.
The creative geniuses in this case are winemakers Don Lange and his son Jesse Lange of the Lange Winery in Dundee, Oregon. Doyle took it upon himself to visit the Langes frequently during the course of a year, largely to hang around, observe, ask questions, and then write it all down in long, often punctuation-free sentences that dare you stop and breathe and sometimes bend the language like B. B. King bends a guitar string to make it cry just right. This is not a how-to book or an apprentice-for-a-year tale: Doyle sometimes seems like the consummate lovable pain in the ass, approaching people at their work and asking that quick question that requires or at least elicits a dissertation-length response complete with luscious tangents and free association, on the part of the person, most often Jesse, he is interrogating. Once you have grasped the premise, each of the 69 short chapters has a standalone quality that makes reading the book like an extended wine-tasting: sniff it, swirl it, hold it up to the light, taste it gently, swallow. A little at a time or taste after taste, it works either way.
Doyle wants to know, straight up, “How actually is wine made?”
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 pseudoknowledgeably about wine, very few of us, it seems to me, have the faintest notion of how grapes get to be glee in the glass.
Doyle regales us with facts and stories about grapes and vines and winemakers, taking us also far afield of the Lange vineyards, to a Trappist monastery that has a huge side business in wine distribution and to Australia, which has its own claims to fame in the annals of pinot noir. He tells us stories of wine drunk offhandedly and drunk sacramentally, on its own or carefully matched with food on the plate. There is a wealth of wine-knowledge here, not textbookish in the least, and possibly, in the view of the most effete wine snobs, presented in a scandalous manner. But Doyle joyfully and recklessly takes us far from the thought-process of the Sunday Times wine columnist, addressing, for instance, an “erudite oenophiliac friend” with the question “What wines would have been near Christ’s elbow at the Last Supper?” and observing that
the Christos—real name, Yesuah ben Joseph—is not recorded as actually drinking wine anywhere in the gospels, except for the sponge of sour wine forced into his mouth as he died, but that he must have sipped and savored many a wine in his day, because he says a the Last Supper that he will not drink of the fruit of the vine again until he can drink it new with his companions at the coming of the kingdom of God, a remark I always found hauntingly sad.
Doyle profiles, too, the winery dog and the Yamhelas peoples native to the place of the Lange Winery; he explores the native soil as well, and the migrant laborers who pick the grapes at harvest, and Lange employees who are vital to the project at hand. But in the end it’s all about the wine, the glee in the glass, and while reading this book you will likely be overcome with the need to put the book down and make your way to the nearest wine shop to explore more closely than before the pinots and chardonnays and merlots on display, not because Doyle has made you suddenly erudite but because he has shown you the people, the work, the good spirit, the vital creative energy that has resulted in this marvelous beverage that has nourished hearts and souls down the centuries, and you will take your next sip in that company. Including, yes, the vineyard dog.
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