Wine and Folklore Share Terroir and Storytelling with Jo Penn Author of Blood Vintage

Natalie MacLean
Oct9th

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Introduction

How far would you go for that first evocative taste of an elusive wine? Why should you try wines and books outside your comfort zone? How is folklore as rooted in a sense of place as much as wine is?

In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I’m chatting with the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Jo Penn.

You can find the wines we discussed here.

 

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Join the live-stream video of this conversation on Wednesday at 7 pm eastern on Instagram Live Video, Facebook Live Video or YouTube Live Video.

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Highlights

  • What’s the significance of terroir and what are the parallels with a writer’s voice?
  • How did Jo make sure to capture the sensory details when writing Blood Vintage?
  • Why does Jo recommend watching the TV show Drops of God?
  • How did Jo weave folklore and pagan rituals into Blood Vintage?
  • What is the genre of “folk horror,” and how does it differ from traditional horror?
  • What was the most difficult part off writing Blood Vintage?
  • Why did Jo decide to launch Blood Vintage through Kickstarter?
  • If Jo could share a bottle of wine with anyone, who would it be, and what wine would they open?
  • Why should you try wines outside your comfort zone?

 

Key Takeaways

  • How far would you go for that first evocative taste of an elusive wine?
    • As Jo asks, what will we do for that one more taste, especially of your first great wine that turned you on to wine? Some people spend their lives and fortunes chasing after certain tastes, which is why they get suckered into buying fake bottles for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s a thin, blurry line between obsession and addiction. Sometimes, it’s not simply the taste that compels us; it’s also the experience of recapturing another time, perhaps with a friend or loved one.
  • Why should you try wines and books outside your comfort zone?
    • Jo is an advocate of encouraging people to try different kinds of wine, without being intimidated by the descriptions that some of us wine writers can use when we get carried away with esoteric or florid prose. Rein it in, Nat! Visiting smaller vineyards is an excellent way to try new wines and to support local winemakers. My advice is parallel to Jo’s when it comes to books. Try something outside your reading genre once in a while. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed her folk horror novel. It expanded my literary taste buds.
  • How is folklore as rooted in a sense of place as much as wine is?
    • Jo explains that folklore includes the traditional beliefs, rituals and superstitions connected to a certain area. It’s rooted in the community and very much terroir-based, like wine. For example, in her area of England they have the Green Man which is the face of a fertility god covered in vine leaves. It appears in a lot of their cathedrals with the odd juxtaposition of Christianity and ancient fertility god. What connects them is the place.

 

Start The Conversation: Click Below to Share These Wine Tips

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Folklore is the traditional beliefs, rituals and little superstitious things that happen around a certain area. So it’s all terroir-based, and it’s rooted in the community. - Jo Penn Jo Penn Click to tweet

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Is it worth sacrifice to make art? - Jo Penn Jo Penn Click to tweet

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Addiction is a very difficult topic in the wine world, but what will we do for one more taste? - Jo Penn Jo Penn Click to tweet

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I use different tools to enhance and amplify my creative voice, just as vintners use the tools of the vineyard to enhance their wine. - Jo Penn Jo Penn Click to tweet

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Try different kinds of wine without being scared of them. - Jo Penn Jo Penn Click to tweet

 

About Jo Penn

Jo Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of horror, thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, and travel memoirs, as well as short stories. She’s also an award-winning podcaster. She has a Master’s in Theology from the University of Oxford. Her latest novel is Blood Vintage, a folk horror story set in an English vineyard.

 

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  • You’ll find my books here, including Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines and Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass.
  • The new audio edition of Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass is now available on Amazon.ca, Amazon.com and other country-specific Amazon sites; iTunes.ca, iTunes.com and other country-specific iTunes sites; Audible.ca and Audible.com.

 

Transcript

Natalie MacLean 00:00:00 How far would you go for that first evocative taste of an elusive wine to have it again? Why should we try wines and books outside our comfort zone? And how is folklore as rooted in a sense of place as much as wine? In today’s episode, you’ll get the stories and tips that answer those questions in Part Two of our chat with The New York Times and USA best selling author Jo Penn. You don’t need to have listened to Part One from last week first, but if you missed it go back and have a listen after you finish this one. By the end of our conversation, you’ll also discover how biodynamic winemakers reduce outside inputs in growing the vines and making the wine. The significance of terroir in wine and the parallels it shares with a writer’s voice. How Jo captured the evocative sensory details when writing blood vintage. How a great sacrifice is worth while to make great wine, art or books. Why you should consider watching the TV show or reading the book Drops of God. How Jove wove folklore and pagan rituals into Blood Vintage. What the genre folk horror really means and how it differs from traditional horror has nothing to do with slasher movies and so on. It’ll surprise you. The pros and cons of launching a book through Kickstarter. How Jo uses artificial intelligence and other tools to enhance and amplify her creative voice and writing, in the same way that vintners use a variety of tools and technologies in the vineyard or in the winery to enhance their wine. And why Jo would want to share a bottle of wine with the psychologist Carl Jung. All right, let’s dive in.

Do you have a thirst to learn about wine? Do you love stories about wonderfully obsessive people, hauntingly beautiful places, and amusingly awkward social situations. Well, that’s the blend here on the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. I’m your host, Natalie MacLean, and each week I share with you unfiltered conversations with celebrities in the wine world, as well as confessions from my own tipsy journey as I write my third book on this subject. I’m so glad you’re here. Now pass me that bottle, please, and let’s get started.

Natalie MacLean 00:02:35 Welcome to episode 306. A few weeks ago, I mentioned my fixation on wine scenes when watching television shows such as The Perfect Couple. Well, I have another one for you from the excellent series called Succession. It’s also about the trappings and abuses of wealth. Wonder why I’m fixated on those shows anyway? In it, one character tells another that she should hyper decant wine, pour the entire bottle of, say, a top notch Burgundy into a blender because “it softens the tannins and ages the aromas. You can age your wines five years in 10 seconds”. Okay, that’s not just stupid rich, that’s stupid science. Abusing your wine in a NutriBullet is not the equivalent of aging it slowly in a cellar for five years. However, I missed the whole point again while obsessing about wine technicalities. The characters focus on immediate gratification without any real knowledge about his assumptions are a perfect metaphor for how he lives. All right, back to our guest, Jo Penn. Just a reminder that her Kickstarter ends on October 15th. I’ll put a link in the show notes so that you can easily find it. And if you’re reading the paperback or e-book of Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation and Drinking Too Much or listening to the audiobook,  I’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to all retailers worldwide at nataliemacLean.com/306. Okay, on with the show.

Natalie MacLean 00:04:21 You’ve mentioned terroir a few times, and in the version that I had I counted 17. So what does terroir mean to you? You’ve said sense of place. Maybe you can expand on that.

Jo Penn 00:04:27 It’s a unique sense of place based on the geography, but also what’s under the earth. So I learned a lot about the limestone that this area is on and how that affects the soil. I didn’t know anything about soil before this. The weather, the rain, what happens with the sun, what direction the slopes are on. Like you don’t buy a piece of land without considering where you’re planting the grapes and what you feed the soil, obviously.

Jo Penn 00:04:54 And I loved it. Lime burn. They let the wildflowers grow, and by the third season of wildflowers, they had some ridiculous number, like 40 different types of wildflowers growing in amongst the vines that these little sheep were going around and eating and then pooing. And that was the whole thing. And but you say in your book wine, which on fire that terroir is like a writer’s voice, your wonderful memoir. And I love that as a metaphor because it’s distinctive, it’s personal. If you know a writer and you get to know their voice, then it’s, yeah, this book Blood Vintage, it’s a JRF pen book, and if you like it, you’ll like my other books, because that’s my voice. And so terroir is just fascinating to me. And super tasters like yourself can tell where a wine is from and maybe even what field and what particular types of grapes, and that’s just incredible. But also terroir sounds a bit like terror. Yeah it does. And I did look this up.

Jo Penn 00:05:51 They are not from the same etymology.

Natalie MacLean 00:05:54 It’s terra as in earth.

Jo Penn 00:05:55 Yet terra as in earth. For terroir and for terra, it’s from Terra, which is frighten, but they sound pretty bloomin similar.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:05 Yes. And you’ve been able to weave them in so nicely together in the book. Yeah. I always thought that because we talk about sometimes in the wine world, terrorists, which always sounds like terrorists, what are these people doing making deadly Cabernet or whatever?

Jo Penn 00:06:21 What do they do?

Natalie MacLean 00:06:22 There’s no real hard and fast definition, but they often are deep into the land, and they make tiny bits of of wine or amounts of wine. Sometimes we call them garages, which started in France because they have their winemaking facilities in their garage because their amounts were so small. So it’s more sort of a wine warrior status. I’m really a purist when it comes to terroir. Nothing should interfere with it. There should be no intervention, although you have to get the grapes to ferment, so there has to be a little bit done.

Jo Penn 00:06:55 That’s quite funny because I did say to Robin Lyman Hill, so where do you get all your cow horns? Because I don’t see any cows. And he did say, we do have to order those from the biodynamic store. But everything else, like they had the patches of yarrow growing and camomile and all the different herbs and all the different plants were all growing there. And they tried very much to keep everything within the ecosystem. And then even they do make a spirit from the grapes, the final press or something like that, the skins. So they use everything they can. It’s a real commitment to this thing.

Natalie MacLean 00:07:28 It absolutely is. Again, I’ve said this a few times, but your writing is so sensual you could easily be a wine writer. And beyond the whole string of grapes and descriptors, it’s very evocative. How did you really dig down to get all of that, or is it just part of your toolkit? You’re such a sensual visual writer.

Jo Penn 00:07:48 I do take a lot of photos, So I have a lot of photos from those vineyards, but I also do a lot of visual research online and also mine sites like yours for words to describe stuff.

Jo Penn 00:08:00 Because I have not been in a vineyard at dawn when the frost comes, and I do feel like that scene, I spent a lot of time on that scene because I was like, this is so important. And also, I do think there is a magic. And Rebecca, the main character, has just arrived from London, where she doesn’t even see the stars because the lights of the big city and she’s there. It’s the middle of the night. They rang a bell like we have to save the buds. So they’re putting out these candles and she’s looking up and there’s the stars. And I was like, I have to capture this. And so I spent a lot of time. There’s a lot of images online of vineyards with frost candles. And they did show me some at London Hill. And so I think for me it’s very much about research and then it’s about point of view and taking it further. But at the end of the day it is fiction. And of course some people were like, it is not romantic at all to put out the frost candles.

Jo Penn 00:08:50 Because everyone’s like crazy and it has to be done quickly. And it’s scary and I romanticize it. But I do think that the sensuality is, as you say, the sensory detail of the writing in a vineyard in particular is so important because people like yourself as well. Your taste people, your smell people, your sight people. And so that’s, I guess, what I’m trying to write.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:12 Absolutely. And you did. And back to those candles. Some other wineries use windmills, but just raising the temperature even 1 to 2 degrees can save vines, like when it’s that marginal and the frost has come. So it is very much like that. But I don’t.

Jo Penn 00:09:28 Think the windmill would have been evocative. No.

Jo Penn 00:09:30 That’s true. Kind of.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:31 Yeah, that’s mechanical and machine like. But yeah, though the bushes, I can imagine the smoke and everything else. It reminds me of that movie A walk in the vineyard or walk in the with Keenan Reeves. You could correct my pronunciation. I’m probably mucking that up as well, but they were talking about the vineyard catching on fire.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:49 Anyway, I.

Jo Penn 00:09:49 Do have some fire in the book. Yes.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:52 Absolutely. Fire is a good metaphor too as well in the book. And another inspiration was the television show Drops of God, which is based on a book of the same name. Is that a show or a book that you would suggest we read as wine lovers?

Jo Penn 00:10:05 Oh, you have.

Jo Penn 00:10:06 To watch it. Maybe if you’re a wine person it’s not as good, but as a non wine person I was like it was amazing. So basically also it’s French Japanese. So it’s partly in French, partly in Japanese. And essentially this wine critic, someone like yourself who’s been writing about wine for a long time but has a huge wine cellar, has collected wine their whole life, and it’s a very prestigious and it’s worth millions, this wine cellar. And there are two people. So there’s he has a daughter, and then he has his student, his kind of apprentice, and they have to do a competition. So there’s five bottles and they’re allowed one taste, and then they can come back a week later and have one more taste.

Jo Penn 00:10:45 And then they write the name of the wine, the year, the vintage, all that, and then whoever wins like three out of five wins. But each week they’re flying around the world, like looking at all the vineyards, trying to work out like they’re tasting the soil. They’re examining all the to try and work out what the hell this wine is. And of course, they’re all really obscure, and then they have to get the year as well. So it’s a fascinating sort of wine mystery, but at its heart, it’s also about family and about culture shock and about just those things that wine can smooth over. So the Japanese and the French vineyards is really interesting. So yeah, Drops of God, it is fantastic. Absolutely recommend it.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:27 I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll have to put that on my playlist.

Jo Penn 00:11:31 It’s beautiful as well. It’s Apple TV so it is beautiful.

Jo Penn 00:11:35 Excellent.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:35 Oh yeah. They’re always shot beautifully. And another inspiration of course, is folklore itself because I wasn’t familiar with folklore or horror.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:43 But maybe you can tell us a bit more of the folklore aspects of the book.

Jo Penn 00:11:47 Yeah, so folklore is more the traditional beliefs and rituals and little superstitious things that happen around a certain area. So again, it’s all terroir based and it’s rooted in the community. It’s rooted in the physical location. So for example, here in the southwest and in fact in England, we have Mayday Bank holiday, which is the 1st of May, which is a Beltane fertility festival. And children dance around maypole with ribbons and maypole are just these very large phallic symbols, let’s say, where beautiful young ladies are meant to dance around them with ribbons, obviously fertility symbols. There’s a lot of bonfires. People jump over bonfires, and then we have Morris dancing, which is a sort of folk dancing where people dress up. And I put this dark Morris dancing troupe into my book, where they wear like crow feathers and black hats, and they wear slashed black makeup and and sometimes they’re hitting. They hit sticks together, sometimes black thorn logs which have spiritual meanings.

Jo Penn 00:12:51 Or sometimes these brussel sprouts, the vegetable they hit together, sticks full of brussel sprouts and they fall around. It’s very weird.

Jo Penn 00:12:59 And everything to do with the vegetable.

Jo Penn 00:13:02 Yes, it’s very well the vegetable stick. It’s a very odd thing. And every single Morris dancing area has different rituals and different things. We also have the Green Man, which is a face of, again of fertility, god covered in vine leaves or other leaves, oak leaves and is in a lot of our cathedrals. So thousand year old medieval cathedrals have the green man in Christian places, the fertility symbols, and then the Horned God, the Wild Hunt, because we have a lot of stag hunting back in the olden times here. So I think it’s really interesting. But I was looking at where you live in Ottawa, right. Ottawa, Canada. Correct. So one of your folklore stories is about the Wendigo. The spirit of cannibalism. Did you know about that?

Jo Penn 00:13:48 No. My God.

Natalie MacLean 00:13:49 No it’s not. My neighbors aren’t practicing that.

Jo Penn 00:13:53 But it’s. It’s interesting. Yeah, it’s a very interesting. The Wendigo from the First Nations people. It often comes from the older indigenous peoples. There’s also the loop guru, the French-Canadian werewolf, which is also in your area. So if people are interested, these stories, they’re so ancient and they emerge in modern culture. So even that Lyman Hill names their wines after pagan festivals that are still celebrated by neo pagans or just reflect it like someone you know is the 31st of October. It’s Halloween, so the veil is thin. It’s the time for winter to come in. The dead are honored. This happens in every culture. It’s just they’re called different things. But yeah, folklore is fascinating. And because it’s so specific to place again, I wanted to bring that in.

Natalie MacLean 00:14:40 Again, the terroir. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, you live in bath, which is where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Frankenstein says time. I’m wondering if I’m doing anything right.

Jo Penn 00:14:51 Pronunciation wise.

Natalie MacLean 00:14:52 Pronunciation. Anyway, so your city has a horror pedigree.

Natalie MacLean 00:14:56 So what is folk horror? Because I think yours was the first horror book I read. And I think of slasher movies like Friday the 13th. Very gory. But what is folklore?

Jo Penn 00:15:08 I’m thrilled that you read it, because a lot of people say, I don’t read horror, so I’m not going to read that. It’s like people saying, I don’t like Chardonnay, so I’m not going to drink that wine.

Natalie MacLean 00:15:17 Open your minds, people.

Jo Penn 00:15:19 Not all.

Natalie MacLean 00:15:20 Chardonnay is alike, but.

Jo Penn 00:15:21 Yeah. Yes.

Jo Penn 00:15:23 But it’s the idea of folk horror. So again, we mentioned folklore and then horror is so wide. It’s a very wide genre. So I’m more of a supernatural horror type of person. It’s a lot more about suspense and slow burn.

Jo Penn 00:15:39 Kind.

Jo Penn 00:15:39 Of feeling you’re in this really quite eerie situation. And is that a blood sacrifice or is that something normal in this area, that kind of thing. It’s this feeling out of place. It’s an outsider coming into an isolated community, feeling like, I don’t know if this is right or not.

Jo Penn 00:15:58 The pagan festivals, the wine, all of that. But to me, the horror that I also bring to it, and this is an interesting question, is is it worth giving a human life? So is it worth sacrificing a human life to the land? Human life is so short, and this land lives so much longer than us and produces something so wonderful. So the blood vintage is so wonderful. Is it worth the sacrifice to make art? Basically. And this comes up across human history. Is it worth sacrifice to make art? And this is what I come back to in horror. And perhaps the real horror is sometimes we might say yes.

Natalie MacLean 00:16:39 If it’s Domaine Romantic Kante, the famous Pinot noir from Burgundy, I’ll kill anybody to get it. So. I love that, but we also, as artists, writers, whatever, give up a lot of our lives to create what we do. Like we’re perhaps not out there as much as other people and so on. So there is a little small death sacrifice going on with if you want to create anything decent.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:01 But yeah, no, that’s a great question. I’ll be thinking about that over the weekend. Is it worth I.

Jo Penn 00:17:07 Think that to me, the real horror and the question at the heart of the book is what will she choose? Because you’re basically offered being part of this community. She doesn’t have a community, she doesn’t have a family. And she’s offered a part of this wonderful vineyard with these amazing things going on. And a lot of it is amazing, right? It is just wonderful. And then it’s what will I give to be part of this? And what will I give to make this wine and or what will I give to drink this wine? Like you said, sometimes this feeling. This isn’t wine. But I went to see the Queen’s Diamonds in Buckingham Palace years ago, and I never. I’ve got a little diamond on my ring, but it’s. I never understood why people did what they did for diamonds, never understood it. And then I went to Buckingham Palace, and I stood in front of one of her collections of diamonds, and I was like, oh my goodness, I want that.

Jo Penn 00:18:01 I would do anything to have that diamond. And I just felt that need, I want that, and I tried to put that in the book. The sort of addiction. Yes. So when she tastes the blood vintage, it’s I really want more of that. And this addiction, I know it’s a very difficult topic in the wine world, but what will we do for that? One more taste?

Natalie MacLean 00:18:24 Absolutely, absolutely. People chase all their lives after certain tastes and it’s why they buy. They get suckered into buying fake bottles for hundreds of thousands of dollars. They’ll do anything because they actually just want that. Especially the first taste to recall your first evocative taste. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Jo Penn 00:18:43 I think it’s very strong. And I also didn’t really understand the collectors that Drops of God is very good on why people collect wine and why they appreciate that. But it’s also, again, we came back to you earlier, like, why do you drink wine with a friend or whatever? And perhaps it’s the experience that we’re looking for rather than that taste.

Jo Penn 00:19:01 It might be taste again for people like yourself who are super tasters, but for me, it’s I want that experience again. And of course, you never can capture it again.

Natalie MacLean 00:19:09 That’s what makes us fools till the end. We keep chasing after it. Oh, it’s just one more glass, one more taste away.

Jo Penn 00:19:15 I’m still enjoying this wine.

Natalie MacLean 00:19:17 Excellent, excellent. I can’t even tell the level on that goblet. It’s very, very discreet. You also mentioned several poisonous plants at the standing Stone cellars property, including hemlock, Hen Bane, Monks Wood and nightshade. And one character says that the land needs them to feed the soils and grow the vines, and that the monks who had alkaloids seep deep into the soil, creating the slight bitterness that adds to the complexity. Nightshade contributes a deep, almost smoky note to the red. I love that idea. Did you make that up, or is that based on viticultural science?

Jo Penn 00:19:48 The fact.

Jo Penn 00:19:49 That you have to ask me is awesome.

Jo Penn 00:19:51 Because.

Jo Penn 00:19:52 You know all this stuff.

Jo Penn 00:19:53 As far as I know, I made it up because I needed some poisonous plants for another particular occasion in the book. And so I thought, but I think the as I said about the wildflowers at Lime Burn Hill and the yarrow, the patches of yarrow and all the things they had growing to be part of it. Why wouldn’t you do that in some way? And those herbs like hemin and hemlock they used in small amounts. Poisons are used in small amounts to bring people again to a different level of consciousness. I guess you could say that about alcohol as well. In smaller doses it’s effective, and in larger doses it can be difficult. But that’s where I got the idea from. If you’re going to plant yarrow, why wouldn’t you plant hen, bean or nightshade? So I don’t know. Have you heard of people using the darker plants? I have.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:39 Not. The most popular one is over in Australia. They have eucalyptus plants which have a very strong oil. And you can taste the eucalyptus, the minty green kind of an unpleasant way in some of their cabernets or Shiraz.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:52 But I haven’t heard of the the poisonous plants, so that would definitely take a darker turn of mind. I think.

Jo Penn 00:20:59 I loved it, but I.

Jo Penn 00:21:00 Think the idea of the flowers and things growing is that some of the whatever’s in the nutrients go into the soil, right? And then the vines pick things up from the soil. So it wouldn’t necessarily be the poison in the wine, but I can’t see why that wouldn’t be like a technically possible thing. So maybe there’s a listener who would love to tell us.

Jo Penn 00:21:18 Absolutely, absolutely.

Natalie MacLean 00:21:19 And that’s why they have the cover crops and all that. You want to encourage the more diversity of plants you have, the more rich and diverse your soil will be microbial and the more different insects and species. There’s a winery in Quebec that has like a hundred thousand different plants and insects and bees because they planted so much as an experiment, and they have this sort of wild nature all around it. It all definitely contributes, for sure.

Jo Penn 00:21:50 Yeah, actually, Rebecca, the character in the book, I have her as an architect, and one of the reasons was because I wanted to redesign the vineyard to bring in more of this stuff.

Jo Penn 00:22:00 So we see here these vertical walls, vertical plantings, and I thought that would be awesome on the side of a winery where you could in the tasting room or something, there’d be actually crops up the side and all and change the water courses. And so I was really interested in how the plans for the vineyard would work. And of course, in the book I have a labyrinth planting, which I think is very unlikely, but I thought that was quite cool. Yeah, no.

Natalie MacLean 00:22:24 There is a winery that has a labyrinth, but also I’m just working on a piece right now on wine and architecture and the Antinori winery in Tuscany, Italy has something like it’s 11 hectares. I got acres and hectares mixed up, but the vines are growing on the roof and sides, the Sangiovese, so it looks like it’s wrapped in this green cloak and the winery is rising up out of the land itself. So it’s really cool.

Jo Penn 00:22:50 That is wonderful. I love architecture, I’ve got architects and so many of my books.

Jo Penn 00:22:54 I think in another life I would have been an architect.

Jo Penn 00:22:56 Yes. You have so many passions.

Natalie MacLean 00:22:58 That’s what makes you a great writer. You pursue. And I was impressed with just how much you dove into the winemaking. And even in our exchanges leading up to this, beyond the book itself. So that’s what keeps you going. What was the most difficult part of writing this book?

Jo Penn 00:23:11 I did love the research, but it got really difficult. And in fact, the biggest change I had to make was the description of the grapes. At the different times of year. I had to even change when the book started. I had it originally starting in February, and my beta readers said, you can’t have frost candles before Bud break. That doesn’t make sense. So I had to change that. But it was really interesting and difficult to try and do all of that research and get it right. But also with Biodynamics, I was having to try and work out like, what kind of moon do you need on what kind of fruit day and what day of the month would this be? And then what would the grapes look like and then what? So there was a whole year I had to map out the viticulture year, the pagan year, the biodynamic year.

Jo Penn 00:23:56 Like there was a lot of trying to get things right. And again, I have to apologize in advance. I am bound to have got something wrong, but I really did try.

Jo Penn 00:24:03 That’s okay. That’s all.

Natalie MacLean 00:24:05 Between that and the whole architecture thing, you’re ready to open your own winery.

Jo Penn 00:24:08 When I’m rich, I’ll just open up vineyards.

Jo Penn 00:24:11 Right.

Natalie MacLean 00:24:11 Sit back on your beautiful veranda and your white dress, flowy dress and your chardonnay. And. Absolutely. I’m intrigued, though, to Joe, you are launching this book not through traditional methods, but by Kickstarter. It’s a crowdfunding platform that people associate often with music, technology and other projects. Why did you choose this format to launch this book?

Jo Penn 00:24:33 The main reason, and I’m sorry to keep showing you, but is this is the special edition for people on the video. It’s got silver foil on it and it’s got a ribbon. It’s got also foil on the inside. It’s got custom wine end papers. it’s basically got a lot of the things that are very expensive to print, but also that you can’t just get from a book on Amazon.

Jo Penn 00:24:56 It is a special edition. These will be first edition, they’ll be signed, and there will only be a short run. And essentially that’s why I do Kickstarter, because what it enables me to do is essentially like pre-orders. So people order the book and they pay on Kickstarter, and then I get the money and I put the order in to the printer. So it turns around the order of getting the money. Otherwise, it’s very hard as an independent to put the money down, get the books printed at this level of quality. Oh, I forgot to show you the sprayed edges. So it’s got green edges and that’s. You will hardly find any traditionally published books that have this kind of level of quality of printing. This is why I love doing Kickstarter. It means I can make beautiful books. And I was thinking about this from the wine point of view. Is the labeling, the packaging. Some of them have these lovely gift boxes, shapes of bottles, the color of the bottles. We have to think about the packaging.

Jo Penn 00:25:55 And so the packaging of this book was just so important to me. And also I love making art and I made this image.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:02 The image is fantastic. Describe that for a podcast listeners.

Jo Penn 00:26:06 Yeah. So is basically a horned skull. And the horns are actually like the moon because I wanted to reflect the biodynamics. And then there’s bloody grapes and bloody grape vines around it.

Jo Penn 00:26:18 And beautiful.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:19 It’s not gory at all. It’s just stunning.

Jo Penn 00:26:21 Yeah.

Jo Penn 00:26:22 Oh thank you. And again, it’s a piece of art and I actually think this could be a wine label. Like it does look a bit.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:28 Yeah, absolutely like that. But you’re right. Like the packaging matters. It’s it not just this would be a beautiful gift book as we come up to the holidays, but also we eat and drink with our eyes first, that beautiful packaging, it just builds the anticipation. Similarly, like if there’s a beautifully gift wrapped present under the tree, it’s just it adds that touch because it engages all the senses, not just taste and smell, but the eyes and the touch and everything else.

Jo Penn 00:26:57 Yeah. And I think as artists, again, we want to make beautiful objects and like wine, it’s a physical product by its very nature. It’s a physical product. You can’t do digital wine. Not at the moment anyway. You can’t plug yourself into the matrix and have digital wine. That’d be great. but yeah, maybe one day. But at the moment I feel like for me, the Kickstarter is really important to me to make beautiful art. And of course, the book’s going to be on Kindle or audio at some point, and that is digital and the story will be the same, but the packaging is not the same and many people hopefully will get multiple editions, which is what I do with beautiful hardbacks. But I think it’s worth at this point in the industry and maybe it’s the same for vineyards. It’s hard to do marketing, and so you have to think about ways to engage readers in a sensory way, like vineyards do. There’s a reason you go to tastings. It’s so you can engage with the product.

Jo Penn 00:27:53 And that’s how I really feel Kickstarter is serving creatives and you can get there are vineyards on their now and wine shops and all of that kind of things. It’s a really interesting, original place. I buy a lot now.

Natalie MacLean 00:28:06 There it is like being a patron of the arts. The call back to the Medici, where people actually fund projects because they want to see independent writers or artists or musicians continue with the work, especially when they’re not on a mass commercial scale and don’t aspire to be John Grisham or Danielle Steel or whatever, they want to create these beautiful art objects and story stories.

Jo Penn 00:28:33 One day, when I am Stephen King, these might be worth something.

Natalie MacLean 00:28:36 That’s true. Invest now you hear to heard it here first.

Jo Penn 00:28:40 But I guess.

Jo Penn 00:28:41 For a vineyard they do small batches. Is it batches? Would that be a similar thing?

Jo Penn 00:28:45 Sure. Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:28:46 Small runs, small batches. Absolutely. And it’s that limited ness that makes it rare and makes people chase after certain bottles even more at auction in different places.

Natalie MacLean 00:28:57 So what makes a successful Kickstarter? You can use this one as an example. I know you’ve done several others, but it’s not just the book that people buy. What? How do you entice them to engage in in your Kickstarter?

Jo Penn 00:29:08 Yes, this is definitely the visuals are really important. So I have made a book trailer, which is a video where you can soar over the labyrinth vineyard and see a bit of the bonfires and all of that kind of thing, and then there’ll be me talking about it. So again, I know vineyard owners and winemakers are doing this too. Coming on your podcast and doing things to get the human angle out there. And obviously with the rise of AI, I know you’ve talked about AI and wine on the show and we have to stand out. We have to say what is special about being human. And so again, Kickstarter is very much about human creation. And of course, this image I made this with AI, I made this with Midjourney, and I love using the tools, but I use them to enhance and amplify my creative voice in the same way that vintners would use the tools of a vineyard to enhance their wine and get their product out there.

Jo Penn 00:30:01 So I don’t see it as any anything different. But yes. So engaging visuals, a compelling story. So telling you that I really care about art and showing people that’s what you care about. Because yes, you’d like to make some money. Everyone would like to make some money. How we continue making our art or our wine. But that’s not the entire reason for sure. It’s about making something beautiful. It’s about engaging with backers. So if you do backer Kickstarter, you basically get access to the creator, you get their email and they talk to you and it’s a it’s more of a relationship and you also get to support them. So actually during the during the pandemic, I was part of like angel wine thing. So you put in money to vineyards and you get you just got sent wine. So it was like an angel thing for vintners. And this Kickstarter is that you can go browse on Kickstarter. Com just go help creators and get something awesome.

Jo Penn 00:30:56 Yeah, absolutely. And is yours.

Natalie MacLean 00:30:58 Your Kickstarter would be something like kickstarter.com/the name of the book or your name. Yeah.

Jo Penn 00:31:03 You can just search for Blood Vintage or I have a link Jeff Pencom forward slash blood vintage will go straight there, and the pro and the con of a Kickstarter is the short period that it is available. So I’ll be doing this for just a couple of weeks. So once this goes out, it’s only a couple of weeks. But then the book will be available in different ways later on. But what’s quite interesting about this book is it is actually on submission out with traditional publishers, but also has had some interest from movie people.

Jo Penn 00:31:34 Congratulations.

Jo Penn 00:31:35 Because it’s super evocative.

Jo Penn 00:31:37 Yes.

Natalie MacLean 00:31:38 No, I can see it as a movie script. It read like a movie script in a great way. Like it really? Yeah, here you come. Netflix or whatever. The maybe the big silver screen as well.

Jo Penn 00:31:47 Yeah. So vineyards keep an eye.

Jo Penn 00:31:49 Out for a movie.

Natalie MacLean 00:31:50 Absolutely, absolutely. So you launched your Kickstarter on October 1st and it’s over by October 15th.

Natalie MacLean 00:31:57 So folks, if you want to participate, get in there quickly. And there’s a limited number of books, I assume, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Wow. Time just flew here. Joe, let me round up with a few last questions. If you could share a bottle of wine with any person in the world, who would that be and which bottle would you open with them?

Jo Penn 00:32:16 I am very much inspired by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. So I studied psychology of religion and his work has inspired my fiction. So Stone of fire, Crypt of Bone have a lot of yunjin, but also my non-fiction book, Writing the Shadow, which is about tapping into the shadow, the dark side. And there’s a heck of a lot of shadow in the wine industry. You and I will have to talk about that.

Jo Penn 00:32:39 Yeah, we’ll get into it.

Jo Penn 00:32:40 But yes. So Carl Jung obviously now dead, but he wrote about wine as a metaphor for transformation of base into gold.

Jo Penn 00:32:48 That was one of his many things.

Jo Penn 00:32:49 The repressed.

Jo Penn 00:32:50 Okay. Yeah. The repressed self. A lot about mythology, a lot about folklore. But I was like, what do you drink with Carl Jung? So I actually had a look where I would want to do it is he has a tower. He did a lot of stone carving again, architecture on the his tower in Bollington, on Lake Zurich. So I looked for some wine in that region. And there’s a wine called, I want to say Chasseur le. Yeah. Maybe you know.

Jo Penn 00:33:14 Is that right? I wouldn’t dare.

Natalie MacLean 00:33:15 Correct your pronunciation after all we’ve been through. Even for wine terms, yes. Shatila or Casillas. But it is the Swiss grape. I think it’s a bright white square.

Jo Penn 00:33:24 Yes.

Jo Penn 00:33:25 So it’s a white, a white wine. And I would put that with a cheese platter. Maybe raclette, you know, which is a melted cheese that you have in that ages. And I would ask him because I’m turning 50 next year and I feel like I would like to ask him about the challenges of midlife and midlife.

Jo Penn 00:33:42 He had a bit of a breakdown, and he wrote this thing called the Red book, and I’ve got a copy. It’s this huge, oversized book. And he did paintings and he just wrote journals, and he was just deep in midlife crisis. And so I love that. I think it’s really interesting. We think of him in academia, but he was just very I want to use the word sensual. And I don’t mean sexual. He was just deeply in life. So yeah. Carl Jung, there you go.

Jo Penn 00:34:07 There you go.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:08 Could have a session while you’re at it. That sounds great. I love that. And as we wrap up, is there anything that we haven’t covered that you’d like to mention?

Jo Penn 00:34:17 I think I would encourage people. I think I’ve listened to a few of your episodes, and people are so good on describing wine, and as someone who is just a normal wine person, I think I’d really encourage people to try different kinds of wine without being scared of it.

Jo Penn 00:34:33 And I feel like sometimes when normal people like me listen to wonderful writers like yourself about wines, we feel maybe a bit stupid in a way. Oh, I can’t try that or I can’t taste that. But what I’ve discovered, I think, by visiting these smaller vineyards, is just try some stuff that’s a bit out of your comfort zone, and it might be super, super interesting, like the orange wine. I’d never tried this sort of volcanic orange wines, and even if you can’t describe them very well, it doesn’t matter. I think supporting the vineyards, supporting the viticulture industry is just as important as supporting the authors and the artists and the writers out there, and it’s a difficult time for everyone and hopefully we can all support each other. But yeah, I absolutely loved writing this book. I love delving into the wine industry and I appreciate all of you a lot more.

Natalie MacLean 00:35:25 Great. And my advice would be parallel to yours. Try something outside your reading genre, like folk horror. I was pleasantly surprised.

Natalie MacLean 00:35:33 It was like the whatever, the funky chardonnay I had never tried before. It was.

Jo Penn 00:35:37 Great.

Natalie MacLean 00:35:38 I loved it, it expanded my horizons. Where can people best get in touch with you, Joe?

Jo Penn 00:35:44 Yes. So JF pen.com/blood Vintage is the book since you’re listening to a podcast, and if you want to write the Creative Pen podcast pen and the pen and Natalie is going to be on my show soon, so maybe, yeah, you can find her there in a couple of months time. And Instagram at JF Penn author. You can find lots of photos that also go with the book, including those vineyards which I hope people will check out.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:10 That sounds like a lot of fun. Great Joe, this has been fantastic, I loved it. I can’t believe how fast the time went, but thank you next time it has to be over a glass of wine in person.

Jo Penn 00:36:19 Oh, absolutely.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:20 Maybe in the part of the vineyard where we’re not allowed to go.

Jo Penn 00:36:24 Because it’s.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:25 Rebels that way.

Jo Penn 00:36:27 Thanks so much for having me, Natalie. That was great, right?

Jo Penn 00:36:29 I raised my glass to you. Cheers.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:36 Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Jo. Here are my takeaways. Number one, how far would you go to have that first evocative taste of an elusive wine? Again, as Jo asks, what would we do for one more taste, especially of your first great wine that turned you on to wine? Some people spend their lives and fortunes chasing after certain tastes, which is why they get suckered into buying fake bottles for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s a thin, blurry line between an obsession and addiction. Sometimes it’s not simply the taste that compels us. It’s also the experience of recapturing another time, perhaps with a friend or a loved one.

Number two, why should we try books and wines outside our comfort zone. Well, Jo is an advocate of encouraging people to try different kinds of wine without being intimidated by the descriptions that some of us wine writers can use. When we get carried away with esoteric and florid prose, rein it in. That visiting smaller vineyards is also an excellent way to try new wines and support local winemakers, she says. And I agree. My advice is parallel to Jo’s when it comes to books. Try something outside your reading genre once in a while. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed her folk horror novel. It expanded my literary tastebuds.

And number three, how is folklore as rooted in a sense of place as much as wine is? Jo explains that folklore includes traditional beliefs, rituals and superstitions that are deeply connected to a certain area. They’re rooted in a community that’s very much terroir based, like wine. For example, in her area of England, they have the Green man, which is the face of the fertility god covered in vine leaves. And it appears in a lot of their cathedrals, which is an odd juxtaposition of Christianity and the ancient fertility god. But what connects them, of course, is place.

In the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my conversation with Jo, links to her website, books, and Kickstarter, the video versions of these conversations on Facebook and YouTube live, and where you can order my book online now no matter where you live. If you missed episode 17, go back and take a listen. I chat about biodynamic winemaking with Thomas Bachelder. I’ll share a short clip with you now to whet your appetite.

Thomas Bachelder 00:39:02 Organics and biodynamics are the same from an organic viticulture point of view and from winemaking point of view is non-intervention. You can use minerals like sulfur and copper, put them into water and spray and they help protect any rainfall. They get washed right out. Now, whether you’re an organics or biodynamics, the copper is a metal. It’s a heavy metal and you can eventually get toxicity in your soil. So even with organics and biodynamics, we are watching copper like a hawk. We have virgin soils over here compared to Burgundy. So I learned from the Burgundians. They actually look at the load they’re putting on a vineyard every year and they try to skip treatments.  Imagine that you’re organic, you’re using organic materials, and you’re trying to skip treatments. It’s like not taking your full antibiotic dose when you’ve been sick. But we do that to try to always use the least interventional land we can.

Natalie MacLean 00:40:06 You won’t want to miss next week when we chat with Tony Edwards, author of The Very Good News About Wine, which focuses on the surprising health benefits and risks of wine. If you liked this episode or learned even one thing from it, please email or tell one friend about the podcast this week, especially someone you know who’d be interested in learning more about biodynamic wines and novels set in a vineyard with a strong wine theme.

It’s easy to find my podcast. Just tell them to search for Natalie MacLean Wine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, their favorite podcast app, or they can listen to the show on my website at nataliemaclean.com/podcast. Email me if you have a sip, tip, question, or if you’ve read my book or are listening to it at [email protected]. In the show notes, you’ll also find a link to take a free online food and wine pairing class with me called The Five Wine and Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner and How to Fix Them Forever at nataliemaclean.com/class. And that’s all in the show notes at nataliemaclean.com/306.

Thank you for taking the time to join me here. I hope something great is in your glass, perhaps a biodynamic wine that makes you feel more connected to the land and to the new book you’re reading, perhaps Blood Vintage. You don’t want to miss one juicy episode of this podcast, especially the secret full bodied bonus episodes that I don’t announce on social media. So subscribe for free now at nataliemaclean.com/subscribe. Meet me here next week. Cheers!

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