Finished reading yesterday, with satisfaction: The Grail: A year ambling & shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world by Brian Doyle 📚
It is, as Brian Doyle says, “a thirsty book.” In just one sentence: a great many enjoyable personal essays on the growing and making of the Lange Estate wines. And really it did make me want to head out and pick up one or several bottles of pinot noir from all around, Oregon or elsewhere, because that is a wine that I do enjoy, among others.
I made many underlinings, and asteriskings, and otherwise notings and dogearings while reading this one, which is my new habit. I am going to let those marginalia age for a month and then come back and I might have more to share about this book. And after I talk it over with my dad who recommended it because he knows many of the people in the book and worked in the Oregon wine industry for almost 30 years, I suspect I’ll have a few more things to say then too.
Oh, and a very unexpected cross connection: this is “a thirsty book”, and so was the chicken “paprika hendl”"very good but thirsty," that Jonathan Harker eats for supper on the 3rd of May in Bistritz, Romania in the very opening of Dracula that I just started reading yesterday.
I read this book in the form of a physical trade paperback that was printed very very well, however if I had one thing to mention it would be that the typesetting was left aligned instead of justified, but I think that may have been a design choice to support the author’s rather conversational, and often long, sentences. Good bright white paper and clear text throughout. A joy to read.
PS: my writing style may, just a bit, have been affected by the writing style of the author of this short book.
