Introduction
Why are pigs roaming up and down the rows of more and more vineyards? Do biodynamic preparations really help vineyards by treating them more holistically or is this junk science? How does fog help vineyards, especially in Napa and Sonoma?
In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I’m chatting with author Sophie Menin.
You can find the wines we discussed here.
Giveaway
Three of you will win a copy of Sophie Menin and Bob Chaplin’s terrific new book, A Year In The Vineyard.
How to Win
To qualify, all you have to do is email me at [email protected] and let me know that you’ve posted a review of the podcast.
It takes less than 30 seconds: On your phone, scroll to the bottom here, where the reviews are, and click on “Tap to Rate.”
After that, scroll down a tiny bit more and click on “Write a Review.” That’s it!
I’ll choose one person randomly from those who contact me.
Good luck!
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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.
I’ll be jumping into the comments as we watch it together so that I can answer your questions in real-time.
I want to hear from you! What’s your opinion of what we’re discussing? What takeaways or tips do you love most from this chat? What questions do you have that we didn’t answer?
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Highlights
- What does “fixing nitrogen” mean, and why is it important for vines?
- Do biodynamic preparations help vineyards by treating them more holistically?
- How does the moon’s gravitational pull influence the ideal time for pruning vines?
- Why are shoot thinning and winter pruning necessary for improving vine architecture?
- How have bats, pigs, and sheep become essential additions to many vineyards?
- Why did one winery decide to plant vines in concentric circles rather than the traditional rows?
- How does light influence wine production?
- What are “crystalline cathedrals,” and how do they help to protect buds in sub-zero weather?
- What methods are vineyards using to warm the air and combat potential damage from frost?
- How does fog help vineyards, especially in Napa and Sonoma?
- In the Museum of Sophie Menin, what three objects would be in the central display?
- Which wine would Sophie pair with her favourite childhood food, carrot cake?
- What are Sophie’s favourite wine gadgets?
- Which bottle of wine would Sophie Menin want to share with Alice Waters?
Key Takeaways
- Why are pigs roaming up and down the rows of more and more vineyards?
- Sophie explains that pigs dig or root with their snouts so they’re perfect for when the soil is dry early in the season because they can’t get down that far, only get down about 10 centimeters, so they don’t affect the root system of the cover rops between the vine rows. When the soil is moist they turn the earth at a deeper level after the plants are established.
- I cannot believe each tiny little bat can eat 1300 bugs every night. This dramatically reduces the need for insecticides. A lot of vineyards are cultivating ways like high shrubs and bat houses to bring them into the vineyard to take care of invasive insects so that they don’t need to spray.
- Do biodynamic preparations really help vineyards by treating them more holistically or is this faux science?
- Sophie believes that viticulturists use biodynamic preparations because they see that it works. Biodynamics is a holistic system, and vines are very sensitive systems. Biodynamics requires an intimate approach to hand-farming and a lot more walking through the vineyards, so there’s a greater awareness of what’s happening on a daily basis. Even very scientifically minded winery owners, she says, are looking empirically at what’s happened in their own vineyards and have become committed to this method.
- How does fog help vineyards, especially in Napa and Sonoma?
- Sophie observes that the fog comes from San Francisco Bay into the Napa Valley at night. It condenses as the air grows colder and sits on the valley floor. It cools the fruit from the hot sun that day. It arrests the development of the fruit. So there are bursts of ripening in the daytime, followed by a cooling in the nighttime. As the air warms in the day, the fog goes up the mountainside. It creates an inversion because it cools the mountain vineyards during the day so that temperatures are more moderated.
Sample Photos from A Year In The Vineyard
Start The Conversation: Click Below to Share These Wine Tips
About Sophie Menin
Sophie Menin is an author and journalist who has contributed to The New York Times, Barron’s, Penta, Departures, Wine Spectator, Edible Communities, Saveur, Tricycle, Punch, B the Change Magazine and Opera News. She earned an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and a professional degree in the Culinary Arts from the Institute of Culinary Education. Her wine writing focuses on the myriad ways that wine connects us with our senses and the rhythms of the natural world. It can be found in her online journal: lifewithwine.com. Sophie lives in New York with her husband and daughter.
Bonus Interview – Ottawa Independent Writers | Writer’s Workshop
Highlights
- The five steps to tasting wine
- What makes a good wine versus a mediocre wine?
- Memoir mistake #1: Assuming that your story is the focus of the book. This is especially important if you’re planning to write your own story someday, whether it’s for broad publication or just for friends and family as a legacy.
About Ottawa Independent Writers
Ottawa Independent Writers (OIW) was formed in 1986 as a venue for people with a passion for creating fiction and non-fiction, for writing poetry and plays, and for stringing words together in a variety of other formats. We are a community for writers to share experiences and learn new aspects of their craft, serving the interests of all writers, from novice to seasoned scribe. We empathize with writers having trouble getting started and we celebrate with those whose works are published. Along the way, we help with the tools and techniques of our craft.
Although the emphasis is on writing, we also focus on the business of publishing, which includes editing, cover design, promotion and marketing, networking, keeping track of finances, and finding a publisher. Writers who need help in any of these areas can be connected with members who can offer advice, or they can be linked to outside experts. OIW’s members are involved in every aspect of the printed and electronic word.
Resources
- Connect with Sophie Menin
- Book: A Year In The Vineyard
- Website: SophieMenin.com
- Instagram: @sophiemenin
- LinkedIn: Sophie Menin
- Zalto Universal Wine Glass
- Ottawa Independent Writers
- Diary of a Book Launch: An Insider Peek from Idea to Publication
- Wine Witch on Fire Free Companion Guide for Book Clubs
- My Books:
- Unreserved Wine Talk | Episode 104: Zinfandel Crusader Joel Peterson, Ravenswood Founding Winemaker
- My new class The 5 Wine & Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner And How To Fix Them Forever
Tag Me on Social
Tag me on social media if you enjoyed the episode:
- @nataliemaclean and @natdecants on Facebook
- @nataliemaclean on Twitter
- @nataliemacleanwine on Instagram
- @nataliemaclean on LinkedIn
- Email Me at [email protected]
Thirsty for more?
- Sign up for my free online wine video class where I’ll walk you through The 5 Wine & Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner (and how to fix them forever!)
- 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) – Why are pigs roaming up and down the rows of more and more vineyards? Do biodynamic preparations really help vineyards by treating them more holistically or is this junk science? And how does fog help vineyards, especially in Napa and Sonoma? In today’s episode, you’ll hear the stories and tips that answer those questions in Part
Two of our chat with Sophie Menin, who has just published A Year in the Vineyard. Three of you are going to win a copy of this beautiful book by the end of our conversation. You’ll also discover why it takes three years to transition a vineyard to become organic, and even more years to bring it to biodynamic viticulture; how bats dramatically reduce or eliminate the need for insecticides in vineyards – you will not believe the incredible appetite of these tiny creatures; and how the intensity and type of sunlight is incredibly important in wine growing. Okay, 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.
As I mentioned, three of you are going to win a copy of Sophie Menin’s gorgeous full colour coffee table book called A Year in the Vineyard. All you have to do is email me at [email protected] and let me know that you’d like to win a copy. I’ll choose three people randomly from those who contact me. And if you’d like to get a sampling of these beautiful photos, you will find them in the show notes at nataliemacLean.com/294. Before we dive in, in personal news, the countdown is on for the audiobook release of Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation, and Drinking too Much. It comes out on July 30th.
Natalie MacLean (00:02:36) – Now it’s got me thinking about why I love audiobooks so much that they’ve become my only way of reading books. And yes, I say reading, not listening because there are some paper loving heretics out there who believe that the only way to read a book is to cut down a tree. This is not meant to be an environmental statement. Anyway, these heretics will say that we audio lovers don’t absorb or remember the book as fully as they do since we’re using our ears, not our eyes. And to that I say fiddlesticks. No need to watch my language in this episode since they’re not listening anyway.
I love the concept of layered learning. I’ll listen to the audiobooks I love most or particular passages from them several times and each time I listen, I get something new from it. Also, memory is tied to emotion. Narrators of audiobooks can convey that emotion with their voices to us in so many ways that black print on a white page cannot. I’d argue that an author’s passages from an audiobook far more deeply in our memory than paper does. Sure, it may be easier to get distracted while listening to a book squirrel, but that’s where layered listening comes in. I will continue my unprovoked tirade against this non-existent paper fanatic next week.
If you’d like to be an early listener to the audiobook, please let me know. I’d love to hear from you at [email protected] I’ll also put a link in the show notes to all retailers worldwide, including the audiobook retailers, as soon as they’re listed at nataliemaclean.com/294. At the end of my interview with Sophie, I’ve included a bonus excerpt from a writers workshop I hosted recently. If you love hearing about the behind the scenes process of writing the book, as many of you have told me that you do, you can continue listening after the main wine related interview. If not, you can skip it. It’s gravy not the main meal. Okay, on with the show.
Natalie MacLean (00:05:04) – Now, you mentioned fixing nitrogen sometimes or I think you mentioned mustard plants between vineyard rows also fix nitrogen. What does it mean, fixing nitrogen? Is it just making sure that nitrogen stays in the soil? And why is that important for vines?
Sophie Menin (00:05:15) – As I said, they will bring nitrogen into the soil and that is taken up through the water in the root system. And the nitrogen is part of building amino acids that are part of building the proteins that build the cellular structure in a plant.
Natalie MacLean (00:05:30) – Yeah, in us too.
Sophie Menin (00:05:32) – And us too.
Natalie MacLean (00:05:32) – Exactly. And how does scattering the ash of burned vine canes, the ones that have sort of gone gray dead, help the vineyard?
Sophie Menin (00:05:41) – It’s a kind of fertilizer the same way volcanic ash is really very fertile. It’s the same thing. It’s a lot as it. Composting is putting everything but the juice back into the soil. The burning of these ashes does the same thing. I could stand to be corrected on that one, but that’s my understanding.
Natalie MacLean (00:06:00) – Yeah. That’s fascinating. Now, we’ve heard of biodynamic preparations that some wineries use stinging nettle tea. You’ve mentioned camomile tea mixtures and cow horns. And they’re following the teachings or writings of Rudolf Steiner, I think it was. What’s your opinion on the efficacy of these treatments? I know you’re not a viticulturist, but what do you think? What’s happening? Why are they using this? And do you think it makes a difference?
Sophie Menin (00:06:26) – I think it makes a difference. But I think people use this system because they see that it works. The people I’ve spoken to have started following it very, very strictly and then adapted to their own vineyard and what works. But it’s a holistic system, you know. Rudolf Steiner started writing after the early industrialization period and factories were industrialized, farms started to be industrialized. And the idea was to treat the farm more holistically, almost like you would holistically like a human being, and to bring it down to a human endeavour or back to a more humanistic endeavor. And so these kind of preparations, if you put them in a big vineyard that was used to using chemical additives or something, I don’t think they would work right.
But it takes three years to bring a vineyard organic. Takes more years to bring it biodynamic from there. So you have these very sensitive systems that are biodiverse and they’re responsive at that point to these kinds of treatment. And it requires a much more intimate kind of hand farming. It requires a lot more walking through the vineyards with these copper spray cans. So there’s just more awareness. Again, it’s a closer to the earth kind of farming. So I’m not a scientist and I only know what I know. And I’m not a wine grower myself, so I only know what I know from reading and talking and tasting. But a lot of very scientifically minded people, people who are watching and looking empirically at what’s happened in their own vineyards, are very committed to this. Now people talk about it, but for a long time there are a lot of wineries who you wouldn’t expect to be biodynamic and they kept it very quiet because it sounded too green for their brand. But now it’s a mark of an environmental care, and I think there’s more disclosure around it. So I believe it works. I know there’s people who would think differently, perhaps because it can seem a little bit esoteric, but I think it does work.
Natalie MacLean (00:08:37) – I think we’re past the “it’s too mushy”, “woo woo” or whatever. And you know, if anything, like you say, at least it’s making winegrowers pay closer attention, even if it’s a placebo effect. The fact you’re paying more attention to your vines and getting them off drugs so to speak, detoxing them off of synthetic chemicals. I think that has to be a good thing for both the vines and the environment.
You talk about the cosmic pull on the vine. So we always acknowledge the sun and how it ripens the grapes, but I want to make sure I was understanding this correctly because I found it fascinating. The moon’s gravitational pull draws the sap up from the roots and into the vines. Is that when it’s ideal to prune the vines or do you want to prune them when the sap falls down? And why is that?
Sophie Menin (00:09:24) – So these are all the very eloquent words of Alois Clemens Lageder and the Lageder family are great proponents of biodynamic farming and explain this so beautifully. And if you can think about the way Clemens explained it to me is it’s like a micro tide in the plant because sap is water and nutrients. And so when the moon is closer to the Earth, the sap is going to be drawn up the vine and into the branches. When the moon’s further away, it’s more likely to be closer to the roots, just like in the ocean. And so that there’s not one better time for pruning. It’s just being conscious of, again, these are very, very small adjustments. But if you have a plant that was too vigorous, you might prune it when the sap is in the vines to calm it down a little bit. If you have a plant that really needs more energy, you would choose to prune when the moon is further away and the sap is more in the root system so that you don’t divert or sap it. For lack of a better word, you know of its strength and vitality.
Natalie MacLean (00:10:30) – That makes so much sense. And we’ve talked about this. Pruning happens at different times of the year in different parts of the plant. But shoot thinning is like altering the vascular system of the vine. Just a wonderful way to put it. And you said it’s a highly technical skill. What could go wrong? You talk about progressive branching and building the vine architecture, lymphatic system. I loved all these comparisons.
Sophie Menin (00:10:55) – But these again, these are the words of Marco Simonit, who is a master pruner who’s been very attentive to vine development and vine architecture, And he trains many of the vineyards in the book, not just the one featured on the features on Marco Simonit, work with him. And he has these two punctuation points where he really trains. He works a lot with vineyard crews and with the viticultural managers of each of the vineyards and the wine growers. So shoot thinning and winter pruning. They’re like they bookend each other because you’re really creating the morphology of the plant. And in that way, hopefully all the plants in the vineyard will flower at the same time and then they’ll develop fruit at the same time and then hopefully ripen at the same time for an even harvest.
And if you think about a plant as an organism, if you keep cutting in a way that blocks the flow of the sap, right? So instead of having a highway, maybe you’re on the back roads and winding around, and it has to migrate around a wound to get up into the vine. Your vine is not going to live as long. It’s not going to produce as much fruit. It’s not going to express its sense of place as well. So if you do spring pruning and winter pruning while being conscious of the architecture of the plant and how sap travels in the interior of the plant, you’re going to have a healthier plant with more longevity that’s going to better express sense of place. And so it’s really interesting.
Natalie MacLean (00:12:34) – Yeah. It’s fascinating. Never got into that. I loved learning about that. All right. Off to our bat houses in Portugal. What are they doing there?
Sophie Menin (00:12:44) – They’re not just in Portugal. They’re everywhere. They’re in Bordeaux. This is the story that we chose to tell about bat houses. Bats eat insects. So lots of vineyards are finding ways to bring bats into the vineyard at night. Each bat could eat like 1300 bugs in a night. It reduces the need for insecticide. And so it’s not just the bat houses, because bats travel using sonar senses.
Natalie MacLean (00:13:11) – So there’s an air bnb bat thingy (laughter)
Sophie Menin (00:13:13) – Exactly (laughter). Actually there was a vineyard in Bordeaux that built paths of trees straight up to the vineyard, built, planted. Then the next highest physical object was the vine. So they would drop down and so a lot of vineyards are cultivating ways to bring bats into the vineyard, to take care of invasive insects so that they don’t need to spray.
Natalie MacLean (00:13:38) – Wow. And this winery in Portugal, though, they built like 100 bat houses, all among the vineyards. These little things on a tall pole looking sort of like birdhouses. But bat houses, I guess. That’s great, bat condominiums just caught my attention. What about the pigs in another region? I can’t remember how many there were.
Sophie Menin (00:13:59) – That was in Berada. It was Philippa Peto. She and her husband, William Waters, have a vineyard there, and they’re biodynamic producers. Apparently, suckling pig is a delicacy that the area is known for. So they thought, well, we’re supposed to use local plants and local vines for cover crops. And we’re growing indigenous local varieties. Why not use local animals and pigs? It turns out they root with their snouts. And so it’s perfect for planting cover crops, because when it’s moist, they turn the earth. And when it’s dry they also – early in the season – turn the Earth and they can’t get down that far. They only get down about ten centimetres and so they don’t affect the root system. So they’ve become great plant companions.
Natalie MacLean (00:14:53) – Oh that’s great. And I love the visual picture of them sleeping as a little group under a tree. Is that what they do?
Sophie Menin (00:15:01) – Yes, they built them houses but they didn’t want to sleep there. They wanted to sleep together under the 100 year old vines or under the olive trees.
Natalie MacLean – So cute.
Sophie Menin – This was a great story. And this is like a little bit of the serendipity of the project, where at one point we were looking for a picture of hail and we couldn’t find a picture of hail that said what we wanted to say. And we wanted to suggest hail maybe more than just show utter destruction. And then we found this photograph by a beautiful photographer, John Wayen. And we contacted him online and spoke to him and then he was just incredibly generous with his photography for the project. And we used his piece, his photograph of a woman in a vineyard seeing a storm coming. But as he was asking us what else we needed, he showed us this picture of the pigs and introduced us to the winemaker. And that’s how this story came in that’s just so full of charm.
Natalie MacLean (00:15:58) – It is. Those pigs are adorable. Pigs can be adorable. There’s a great picture.
Sophie Menin (00:16:03) – So cute. Yeah, and really, for me, also discovering such a great winemaker. She’s so talented. And the wines are excellent.
Natalie MacLean (00:16:13) – Wow. All right, we’ve got one more animal stop to go here. Bonterra in California. Well known. Organic and biodynamic or organic, perhaps.
Sophie Menin (00:16:22) – And biodynamic.
Natalie MacLean (00:16:24) – Biodynamic as well. Wow. So they have 3000 sheep. So what are the sheep doing? Why didn’t they hire pigs? (laughter).
Sophie Menin (00:16:33) – (laughter) Well the pigs are very specialized (laughter), but the sheep do more and more. That was so interesting in this interview. They brought the sheep in, as many people do, to graze before and after the harvest and they graze and they leave fertilizer naturally. They would rotate the sheep through the vineyards, which is so interesting to use them at scale in this way. And then the longer they were around, the more they found for them to do. So they do clearing of potential fire hazards.
Natalie MacLean (00:17:04) – Land mowers.
Sophie Menin (00:17:05) – Land mowers, exactly. If there’s dangerous places to clear grasses that they need to say on the faces of dams, they use the sheep for that. They bring them down to the Russian River and have them get rid of invasive grasses. So that the longer the sheep have been integrated into the vineyard, the more and more they do get integrated into the vineyard. And then they told me this funny story, because when they first had the sheep the only problem was kind of the herd mentality. So if one sheep took off in a particular direction, they all might follow and run. And at first the drip irrigation was lower and they would invariably take out a row of drip irrigation. So they had to redesign the drip irrigation to have the fruiting wire a little higher and the drip irrigation a little higher so that there was room. When the sheep wanted to run, there was room for them to run in the vineyards.
Natalie MacLean (00:17:58) – That’s great. Oh, I love that. And at the same time, reducing their environmental hoof-print, I assume.
Sophie Menin – Exactly.
Natalie MacLean – Why did one winery decide to plant vines in concentric circles rather than the traditional rows?
Sophie Menin (00:18:13) – Well, that also goes to hoofprints. They started working with horses in the vineyard to have less compaction than a tractor and also to bring the animal element in. And if you think about it, concentric circles are much easier when you have a horse drawn plow than you would if you had to go to the end of the row and then turn around and come back. So there is that contiguous circle. I think there’s also like energy and vortex and kind of some mystical elements to it. Like you would see those kinds of shapes in other cultures. But on the very practical reason, if you have a horse drawn plough, it’s a really nice, smooth way for taking the animal through the vineyard.
Natalie MacLean (00:18:58) – Yeah. It’s great. And you talk about compaction, of course. How compacted the soil gets from the horse is going to be far less than a machine, a tractor, or whatever. So it’s very good for aeration of the soil and not getting plowed down so much.
Sophie Menin (00:19:13) – Exactly.
Natalie MacLean (00:19:14) – And in the book you observe that grapevines are self pollinating. How does that happen without assistance from. We’re going to have a birds and a bees discussion without the birds and the bees. (laughter)
Sophie Menin – [laughter]
Natalie MacLean – But what’s happening with the grapevine?
Sophie Menin (00:19:27) – So it has the stamen and the pollen within the flower. That’s why when we talked about Olivier LaFleuve and he said the think you don’t want is a wet flowering because once the vines flower and they open, the stamen and the pollen are both in the vine flower. So what you want is that fertilization to happen once the flower is opened. That’s my understanding. So that they’re what you would call self pollinating or hermaphroditic actually, because it has all the elements it needs for creating fruit within the flower.
Natalie MacLean (00:19:58) – And if it’s wet they don’t sort of connect, the two pieces?
Sophie Menin (00:20:02) – You can imagine, right. Like the wet pollen might not float in the air with a little breeze. That might not happen in the same way.
Natalie MacLean (00:20:10) – Gotcha. Okay.
Sophie Menin (00:20:11) – Might get washed away.
Natalie MacLean (00:20:13) – Yeah. You have again, more beautiful phrases in the book, such as the cycle of the vine capturing the sun’s energy.nIt’s lovely. You know what that reminded me of Sophie? It was Monet, one of the Impressionist painters, would take the same subject over and over and just paint it in different types of light, like he did one wall 19 times. One with like morning bright white light and then amber tones at the afternoon, then blue light. Do you see similarities with winegrowers studying the light? I mean, surely they’re focused on the sun and so on but any other observations there?
Sophie Menin (00:20:47) – A light is incredibly important in wine growing. How much the intensity of the light and what I really had the honour of walking with Chris Howell on Spring Mountain, which, you know, 85% of Cain Vineyard and Winery was burned down in The Glass Fire. And so he was in the process of replanting…
Natalie MacLean (00:21:09) – Sorry. For those who don’t know, where is this located?
Sophie Menin (00:21:11) – Oh, sorry. This is in the Napa Valley. So, you know, Chris is a great Francophile and was really. inspired by the wines of Burgundy. And so he used to have beautiful guyot trellising with full exposure for the vines and for the fruit. But now that he’s replanting, he really understands in California’s Mediterranean climate. What you really need is dappled light to grow beautiful fruit. And so he’s changed the architecture of the vineyard there on these terraces, and instead of two rows per terrace, there’s one row so that the vine canopy can kind of arch out and allow just the right amount of light in. Because controlling the light is really very important to the speed of the development of the fruit.
Natalie MacLean (00:22:03) – It’s wonderful. Another phrase crystalline or crystalline cathedrals. What were you describing there?
Sophie Menin (00:22:09) – So I once had the pleasure of sitting next to Christian Morrow at a Chablis lunch, and he showed me this picture, the one that’s in the book, that he had taken of his vineyard. And to protect vines from frost and buds, particularly from frost which could damage the whole harvest before it even gets going. In Chablis, they use something called aspersion and this means that the second it turns 32°F or 0°C, they start to run sprinklers and they keep running the sprinklers until the temperature rises and the ice begins to melt. Because what happens is the water freezes around the buds, creating a cocoon where it stays 0°C or 32°F. The temperature doesn’t change, so you don’t lose the bud to frost. But when you look at it, speaking of light, you see that kind of winter sun reflecting off these long strips of ice, and it is like a crystalline cathedral. I mean, it’s just magnificent to look at. We have a picture in the book with this explanation. Yeah, it’s really beautiful, almost otherworldly.
Natalie MacLean (00:23:28) – Lovely, lovely. Yeah. Lovely turn of phrase as well. So speaking of bud break, you know it is a very vulnerable time and especially since an early frost can cause a lot of damage. In B.C., for example, they’ve lost 97% of this year’s crop. I wonder if that would have helped them or if that’s something that can do in future years. Even infrared photos of these buds show that they’re black to the core, and that’s going to take years to recover. Like it doesn’t just pop back next year. So another way that some wineries fight this extreme cold is with smudge pots. What’s their purpose? I guess it’s just to circulate warmer air in the vineyard. But then again, you say they’re moving away from smudge pots to different methods as well, right?
Sophie Menin (00:24:11) – I mean, they do warm the vineyard. They bring heat to the ground of the vineyard. People are moving away from them just because you’re burning kerosene in the vineyard. And it’s bad for the environment, but it’s also a very traditional way. It’s still used. It’s effective. It’s just not the best for the environment.
Natalie MacLean (00:24:29) – Sure. Now they’re increasingly using wind machines, right? Wind machines get the warmer air down.
Sophie Menin (00:24:36) – Exactly.
Natalie MacLean (00:24:37) – Yeah. Another lovely phrase, fog is the visualization of cold air. How does fog help vineyards, especially in Napa and Sonoma?
Sophie Menin (00:24:44) – Well, this was also Chris Howell explaining this to me. So fog comes in from San Francisco Bay into the Napa Valley and at night it condenses as the air grows colder and it sits on the valley floor and it cools the fruit after being in the hot sun all day. So it essentially arrests the development of the fruit. So you have these bursts of ripening followed by a cooling followed by. And then as the air warms, the fog goes up the mountainside. So actually, it’s why it creates what they call an inversion because it cools the mountain vineyards during the day. So that what you have in the mountains in Napa is this kind of continuous, more moderated temperatures because you had the cooler evenings and then the cooler days from the inversion created by the fog traveling up the hillsides. So you have two very beautiful expressions of Cabernet Sauvignon just slightly different characteristics for having different ripening patterns even though they’re so close to each other.
Natalie MacLean (00:25:54) – Yeah, and the photos of the fog on the vineyards are just magnificent in the book as well.
Sophie Menin (00:25:59) – They’re extraordinary. We’re grateful to them for sharing us, those photos with us.
Natalie MacLean (00:26:04) – Yeah. What is massale selection? Is that the vine cane pruning? Am I treading back on what we’ve already talked about some of these technical terms.
Sophie Menin (00:26:14) – That’s exactly what it is. So in a place like Lafarge in Volnay, around the harvest right before they’ll go around and they’ll look at all their vines and the ones that they want to replicate that they think are really thriving in their environment. They will go and they’ll put a blue ribbon on it. And then when it comes time for winter pruning, they will take a branch from that vine to cultivate to graft on to rootstock later on. And that’s the advantages of that, is that you have finds that are highly adaptive to your particular place. They’ve been speaking with the environment and the other plants and trading information. So you’re not kind of using clones that you’re bringing in. You’re likely to have a higher success rate and might have a more distinctive wine. I think that’s the idea because it’s something that’s been cultivated specifically with your piece of land, in this case, for generations.
Natalie MacLean (00:27:14) – Great. You describe harvest poetically as the death of the vine, the birth of the wine. I love the picture of the grape harvester in the Mosel region of Germany carrying a massive basket on its back. What’s happening there?
Sophie Menin (00:27:27) – I want to back up because that’s Franz Venega’s line and I love that line. And when he said it, I was like, oh, that’s the opening of the harvest section. What a great turn of phrase. So in the Mosel, as you know, there’s different levels of German wines, particularly Rieslings are categorized by their level of sugar ripeness, and so they will harvest in tries. First, the dry wines, the Kabinett wines, and then the Spätlese wines and then the Beerenauslese wines. And so as it gets later and later in the season, it gets colder and probably a little damper. And these are really steep slopes. And so this is a picture of a harvester climbing those steep slopes with a basket on his back. Harvesting. Really doing the very hard work of harvesting the Riesling, this very special wine from the Mosel.
Natalie MacLean (00:28:22) – Yeah. The basket almost seems as big as he is. And some of them have to pick lying down, the slopes are so steep?
Sophie Menin (00:28:29) – Right. And slick. Exactly.
Natalie MacLean (00:28:30) – My goodness, that just sounds like a mission impossible kind of.
Sophie Menin (00:28:35) – The winemaker said that Riesling vines like cold feet and a warm head.
Natalie MacLean (00:28:42) – Interesting. Have you discovered anything new that you would add to an updated edition? I know it’s just out, so we probably not there yet, but is there anything?
Sophie Menin (00:28:51) – We just got limited by the number of pages, so there are stories we had to leave out. We would have loved to have gone more deeply into trellising. And then there’s some wineries that had a vineyard that was just an experimental vineyard, trying all different kinds of grape varieties to see what might work. And so there’s the story about what happened to vineyards that are left untended that were interesting too. So it’s the stories that got left on the floor because we ran out of pages, more so than something new at this point at least.
Natalie MacLean (00:29:26) – Excellent. So lightning round. This has gone so quickly. I love this conversation. But in the museum of Sophie Menin, what three objects would be in the central display?
Sophie Menin (00:29:35) – Well, there would be my universal wine glass from Zalto, which I love. There would be my yoga mat, which I can’t live without, and there would be my computer which I think may be my third arm.
Natalie MacLean (00:29:51) – [laughter]
Sophie Menin (00:29:52) – I always seem to be attached to.
Natalie MacLean (00:29:54) – Absolutely agree. Tell us about your favourite childhood food and what wine you’d pair with it.
Sophie Menin (00:30:01) – Oh that’s a good question. I loved carrot cake as a child and so I happen to love Moscato d’Asti. I love the kind of flavours, especially when it’s well done and it’s so light and alcohol, it’s like 5 or 6%. So at the end of a meal, if you just want something delicious and sparkling and I think it might be carrot cake and Moscato d’Asti.
Natalie MacLean (00:30:21) – I am going to have to try that this weekend. I mean it, carrot cake is my favorite, so but that’s a brilliant pairing. I love that it’s got a bit of spritz, just a bit of like sweetness. Oh, I don’t know if your favorite wine gadget is your Zalto glass, but would that be it? Or do you have something else?
Sophie Menin (00:30:36) – I do have something. Well, I guess it might be my Zalto glass, but I also happen to love my foil cutter because it keeps me from cutting my fingers. And it helps me open wines more gracefully in front of guests. And so it’s one of those simple like right dollar things that can make all the difference.
Natalie MacLean (00:30:55) – Is there a particular brand or just any foil cutter?
Sophie Menin (00:30:58) – Just any foil cutter. This looks like it was a gift from a wine store. My other gadget I think would be my cave.
Natalie MacLean (00:31:05) – Oh, nice.
Sophie Menin (00:31:06) – Because temperature is so important to tasting the fruit both in red and white wines, and so I can’t speak enough to red wines need to be cool enough to taste the fruit, and white wines need to be warm enough to taste the differentiation from we might have the most enjoyable experience. It’s much more narrow than you might think.
Natalie MacLean (00:31:28) – Absolutely. If you could share a bottle of wine out with any person outside the wine world, living or dead, who would that be and which bottle would you open?
Sophie Menin (00:31:36) – Oh, outside the wine world. That’s interesting. Well, I don’t know. Would Alice Waters be outside the wine world?
Natalie MacLean (00:31:44) – Yes. We’ll let that in. Yes.
Sophie Menin (00:31:46) – I would love to drink a glass of Domaine Tempier with Alice Waters, because I wrote this piece for The Daily Beast about how she learned to cook there, and so that feels like such an important spot for understanding how we eat and drink. Now, you know, this kind of Alice Waters relationship with Lulu and Domain Tempier. And so I would love to hear more about that.
Natalie MacLean (00:32:12) – Me, too. And of course, she was in Berkeley. She had a famous restaurant. I don’t know if it’s still an open.
Sophie Menin (00:32:19) – I think it is still open.
Natalie MacLean (00:32:20) – Okay. All fresh produce and so on. And of course, her sort of companion in wine crime would be Kermit Lynch, who kind of celebrated Domaine Tempier I think it was in his book Adventures on the Wine Route. Yeah, the Rosé especially. But yeah, the two of them. Great pairing. You could invite Kermit to if you I said outside the wine world. Another exception. You could invite Kermit. [laughter].
Sophie Menin (00:32:45) – That would be such a pleasure, then. [laughter].
Natalie MacLean (00:32:49) – Wow .The time. Is there anything we haven’t covered, Sophie, that you’d like to mention?
Sophie Menin (00:32:53) – You know, we covered it earlier, but just that I couldn’t have done this without my co-author, Bob Chaplin. It’s been a great collaboration. And that was such a pleasure. And I have to make sure in an interview like this that he gets the acknowledgement that he more, more than deserves.
Natalie MacLean (00:33:12) – Excellent. All right. Hold up that book again. We’re going to put it in the show notes A year in the Vineyard. I expect it’s available wherever you can buy books online in book retailers. Is there anything else you want to mention about where people can get it?
Sophie Menin (00:33:26) – Sure. I mean, you can get it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or whatever your preferred retailer is. If you can’t find it there within the week, you could find it on my site SophieMenin.com and I’ll send one to you directly.
Natalie MacLean (00:33:41) – Okay. That sounds great. Wow. Well congratulations again, Sophie, this is a wonderful achievement you and Bob have put together. And I mean, the photos are stunning. In an interview like this, of course, we focused on the words, the text, but we’ll put links in the show notes and people can see just how gorgeous it is. You sent me a few photos as well and we’ll include those so people can get a taste. But really, it’s a book well worth buying, not just for your coffee table and friends but to read this beautiful book. Thank you, Sophie, for joining me here today. It’s been a pleasure to chat with you.
Sophie Menin (00:34:13) – Oh, it’s really been my pleasure. Thank you.
Natalie MacLean (00:34:16) – I’ll say goodbye for now and look forward to connecting with you, perhaps in person sometime for a glass of wine.
Sophie Menin (00:34:21) – I would love that.
Natalie MacLean (00:34:22) – All right. Cheers.
Sophie Menin (00:34:24) – Cheers.
Natalie MacLean (00:34:29) – Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Sophie. Here are my takeaways. Number one, why are pigs roaming up and down the roads of more and more vineyards? Sophie explains that pigs dig or root with their snouts, so they’re perfect for when the soil is dry early in the season because they can’t get down that far. Only about ten centimetres, she says. So they don’t affect the root system of the cover crops between the vine rows. When the soil is moist, they can turn the earth over at a deeper level after the plants are established.
Number two, I cannot believe that each tiny little bat can eat 1300 bugs every night. This dramatically reduces the need for insecticides, and a lot of vineyards, as a result, are cultivating ways to bring them into the vineyard like the high shrubs they’re planting and the little bat houses. So cute to bring them in and take care of the invasive insects so that they don’t need to spray.
Number three, do biodynamic preparations really help in vineyards by treating them more holistically, or is this junk science? Sophie believes that viticulturists use biodynamic preparations because they see that it works. It is a holistic system, she says. Vines are very sensitive plants. Biodynamics requires an intimate approach to hand farming a lot more walking through the vineyards, so there’s greater awareness of what’s happening on a daily basis. Even very scientifically minded winery owners, she adds, are looking empirically of what’s happened in their own vineyards and have become committed to this method.
And number four, how does fog help vineyards, especially in the Napa and Sonoma valleys? Sophie observes that fog comes from San Francisco Bay into the Napa Valley at night. It condenses as the air grows colder and sits on the valley floor. It cools the fruit from the hot sun that day. It arrests the development of the fruit at night, so there are bursts of ripening in the daytime, followed by a cooling in the nighttime. Settle down as the air warms in the day, the fog goes up the mountainside and it creates an inversion because it cools the mountain vineyards during the day, so the temperatures are more moderated.
In the show notes, you’ll find the full transcript of my conversation with Sophie, links to her website and books 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. You’ll also find a link to take the free online food and wine pairing class with me, called the Five Food and Wine Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Dinner and How to Fix Them Forever at nataliemaclean.com/class. And that is all in the show notes my friends at nataliemaclean.com/294. Email me if you have a sip. tip question, or would like to win one of three copies of Sophie’s new book A year in the Vineyard. I’d also love to hear from you if you’ve read my book or are interested in listening to it at [email protected]
If you missed episode 104, go back and take a listen. I chat about growing and making Zinfandel in Napa Valley with Ravenswood winemaker Joel Peterson. I’ll share a short clip with you now to whet your appetite.
Joel Peterson (00:38:00) – Baby back ribs are a wonderful match, and there are several wines that go really well with baby back ribs in part because Zinfandel has this really pretty sweet fruit. The blend we’re talking about is Besieged, which is a traditional California field blend based on what California did pre-prohibition. Nobody was trying to make for Seattle wines. They were trying to make wines that tasted good and were particular for that location. They planted grapes together called Zinfandel, of course, Petite Sirah, turning on Alicante Bouquet, sometimes a little Grenache, sometimes a little Syrah, sometimes a little bit of Mourvedre. But those were the blending grapes of California. And so Besieged is based on that concept.
Natalie MacLean (00:38:49) – And now here’s part one of the bonus excerpt from the Writers workshop I hosted recently. We explore topics such as the five steps to tasting wine. Of course, you have to drink before you write. What makes a good wine versus a mediocre wine and a memoir? Mistake number one ,assuming that your story is the focus of the book. This is especially important if you’re planning to write your own story someday, whether it’s for broad publication or just for friends and family as a legacy.
OIW Host (00:39:25) – Good evening, everyone, and welcome to our May evening event. It’s so nice to see so many of you. This is our May speaker event for OIW. I want to start, first of all with the land acknowledgement. We begin by acknowledging that the land that OIW calls home is a traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. The Algonquin peoples have lived here since time immemorial. They are the keepers of the land and have been sharing stories of the land and its people for millennia. As a writers’ organization, we encourage everyone to learn more about the history of the indigenous people and their stories. We’ve had many speakers throughout the last few seasons who have provided us with some great insights into their experiences.
I just wanted to share with you that I recently read an amazing book by Dawn Dumont. The book is titled The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour, and it is the hilarious story of an unlikely group of indigenous dancers from Saskatchewan who find themselves thrown together on this performance tour in Europe in 1972. It’s based on a real story, and it’s filled with misadventures and romantic triangles, and it’s a gem of a novel. I’m bringing it up because I think it’s great to share whatever is out there that’s available, and I hope that somebody does include it in their summer reading. So that’s for the land acknowledgement.
I am so pleased to welcome Natalie MacLean, who is our guest speaker today. She is a memoir writer and accomplished Canadian wine expert. She’s also the winner of the James Beard Award and the author of the New York Times best selling book Red, White and Drunk All Over, among other books. Her latest book, Wine Which On Fire, exposes the downside of the wine industry and its effect on those who toil in it. So tonight, Natalie is going to be sharing her five lessons learned from the trenches of memoir writing. But before that, we are going to be getting a very unique wine tasting lesson. And so, Natalie, over to you.
Natalie MacLean (00:41:47) – All right. Thank you, Sue. One of the things that book tour has taught me is don’t get between people and their wine. Do the wine stuff first, and then you can say whatever it is you want to say. So that’s what I’m going to jump into. But do feel free to start sipping. You don’t have to wait for me officially to get there.
I am so happy to be here. Sue and Lori, thank you for inviting me. Hopefully you can see my slides. I’m just going to keep motoring through since I have a lot to cover with you tonight. Sue has already introduced me, so I won’t belabour this one. Wine Witch On Fire is my memoir. That’s what I’m going to be using as an example. Tonight, you can get the Free Reader’s Guide at winewitchonfire.com.
Natalie MacLean (00:42:28) – I mention that because you may want to use it as a template for your own reader’s guide if you haven’t developed one. Because I’m a big believer in book clubs, spines and vines, books and bottles. We’ve heard the memes and the jokes that sometimes my book clubs read books or whatever it is, but it’s an excuse to get together and chat over wine. And just to give you a bit of an example of what’s in this, we pulled out about 13,000 words from my book because it was getting a little too long because I had wine tips and recommendations at the end of each chapter. So we just pulled that out into a reader’s guide and how to organize your own wine tasting, that sort of thing. So it’s substantial, but now we’re going to do how to taste wine like a pro. All right. So whether you have wine or whisky or water, it doesn’t matter what’s in your glass. I’m going to go over the five easy steps to tasting wine like a pro. I’m wondering who was able to get either of these wines tonight.
Natalie MacLean (00:43:26) – I recommended the Sauvignon Blanc from Santa Rita 120. Very reasonably priced. I think this was around $13 – $14 and the Henry of Pelham Baco Noir. They make a number of different Baco Noirs. It’s from Niagara, but it’s I think it’s both are exceptional wines for the money. And even if you don’t have those, that’s okay too.
So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go step by step. There’s five steps to tasting wine. First one is you want to look at the visual. How does that wine look. And you can swirl it. Now you often see a lot of people swirling their wine raising it up to the light in restaurants. Looks very sophisticated. Yeah. Don’t do that. All that’s going to tell you is how many colours can the wine reflect from the wallpaper? What you really want to do is get a napkin, a white tablecloth, a book that happens to have a white back on the cover and look at it down that way. What you’re looking for I’m going to really summarize at a high level is that when it comes to white wines, the deeper the color, usually the more mature the wine, the older it is or it could be oak aged. One of those two things. Now, if you have the red, the colour of red wines tends to go from like a ruby red to deeper, darker colours. And then as it ages, it can go lighter again into a bricky color. So again, very high level. The other thing about the visual is that nothing should be floating in your glass. No, no little quirky bits. Nothing else. That’s not to be confused with corked, which is a fault of wine when it tastes like or smells like a musty attic. So it should be clear.
So step number two is probably the most important, even though we all want to get to tasting. And again, please go ahead and taste your wine. You don’t have to stay with the class here, but the smell. We can detect, it’s now estimated millions, if not maybe even trillions of aromas. That’s because different aroma molecules can combine in different ways and settle in our olfactory receptors. The beauty of wine is actually really in the nose. So you want to swirl the wine, you want to volatile the esters. If you want a fancy term or a bumper sticker for a wine geek, you want to get the aromas of the wine airborne to actually smell them. And when you swirl now you can do the training wheels version on the table. But after you agitate the wine, you want to get your beak right in there. Stick your nose in. Really give it a good sniff. Actually, our acuity of our smell changes every 3 to 4 hours, from our right hemisphere to our left hemisphere and back again. So it’s not just pure snobbery this going on, but that’s what they’re trying to do now when it comes to the white wine.
Usually people are shy when I go through this, but does anyone want to volunteer anything in terms of what they smell? Let me give you a little warm up here first, because you can’t do more bizarre than this. When I teach my online food and wine pairing course students, I’ve had classes where one woman said, wow, this Riesling that we’re tasting reminds me of the Dallas airport. And everybody’s going, what? And she was bang on. Because mature Riesling often takes on a bit of a petrol jet fuel smell.
And another woman said, this Chardonnay smells like my son’s gerbil cage. Any guesses to what she was picking up there? Wood chips from oak aging. So if I smell this Sauvignon blanc, classic aromas of Sauvignon blanc are like lemon, lemongrass, lime zest. Often it’s called gooseberry. But a lot of us aren’t familiar with what is gooseberry. But fresh citrus and it almost makes your mouth water to even think about it because there’s lots of zingy acidity on the palate.
In the red wine that we’ve got, it’s a full bodied red. So what you’re going to look for are probably darker fruit aromas. Your red and black fruit, whether it’s black cherry or black currant or blackberry or dark plums or whatever, whereas whites – generalizing a whole bunch – tend to be your white fruits, your orchard fruits, your apples, your pears and peaches and that sort of thing. So this one is more citrusy, the Sauvignon blanc. All right, taste, let’s get into that.
Natalie MacLean (00:47:58) – So when we taste, does it matter which glass we use? I am using a universal glass. But if I were pouring Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, I’d use a what I call – excuse my French here – big ass glass, because they’re very aromatic wines. And I’d want to collect the aromas in this bigger bowl. And then you see how it goes up at the top. It collects the aromas up there. So with taste, what we’re doing when we have the wine in our mouth is we’re heating it up. And that’s good. We’re going to get a deeper sense of the flavours and aromas, but you literally often see people, the wine snobs, almost gargling their wine there all over the place. What they’re trying to do is spread it out because we have taste buds all over our mouths are soft palate, our cheeks, our gums. You can detect all kinds of flavours not just with your tongue. So get in there, swish it around, give it the Scope treatment, and see if you can get an even richer sense of the flavours that we just talked about in terms of aromas, because what’s on the nose should translate to on the palate.
Natalie MacLean (00:49:09) – All right. The other thing, step number four while we’re tasting is the body. Is it full bodied, medium bodied, light bodied? The easiest way to remember this is that does the weight of it – not the taste – but does the weight of it feel like skim milk? That’s like medium bodied. Let’s say 3% or homogenized or cream, really voluptuous and full bodied. That’s the way you can tell. So for this Sauvignon blanc, it’s light body to maybe medium. It’s nice and zippy. For this Baco Noir, I’ve already given that away. It’s a full bodied red wine. Nice and smooth to the finish. After you swallow, wow long do the wine’s aromas keep coming back to you? Remembrance of things tasted in the past, right? The longer the better. Like most sensual pleasures in life. Right. So a really neat thing to do is to swallow the wine and then breathe out through your nose, because you will have heated it up because it’s trickled down through your throat. Breathe out through your nose and you will get a much stronger sense of the aromas and flavours in the wine.
Natalie MacLean (00:50:22) – Now make sure you are just breathing out. You’re not sending the wine back out through your nose, because that’s very painful. And you will have to turn off your video camera because it’s also very embarrassing. I’ve done it, so give that a try. You’re swirling, you’re looking at it. And I would say for the Sauvignon Blanc, the finish is maybe short to medium. And that’s not a criticism. It’s meant to be light and zippy. The Baco Noir is much longer.
OIW Host (00:50:48) – I am curious about something. What would make a good wine? So you’ve done all that tasting, and I love the way you use your profile to show where you’re going. That was very helpful. But what how would you say one is a good wine and one is a mediocre wine? Like what’s your categories for that? So with wine, it is really subjective in all sincerity. The best wine is the one you like. The old adage is pair the wine to the diner, not the dinner. Now beyond that, there are objective factors you can look at. Is the finish long? Is the depth and complexity different? Do you just get blackberries and that’s it, or are you getting tobacco leaves and violets and all the rest of it? You get to be a bit geeky if you start to analyze the wine for its different facets and how it excels or doesn’t on those five dimensions sight, smell, taste, body and finish. The finish is often one that people look for, definitely in a great wine. Price isn’t always, it’s not a linear relationship. It’s $100. You should be getting a good wine, but sometimes you can get a $20 wine that is amazing and you don’t need to pay that much.
OIW Host (00:51:59) – That’s very helpful. Thanks. Okay. All right, here comes the trailer for a deeper personal memoir. Wine Witch On Fire is about divorce, defamation and drinking too much. Please join us in welcoming Natalie MacLean back to the show.
Natalie MacLean (00:52:18) – For me, what it means is a wise woman who’s been through the flames and comes out the other side stronger, wiser and fiercer. It started with my divorce coming out of the blue for me from my husband of 20 years, and then ended with, at the end of the year, an online mob of rivals coming for my job. In any memoir that does its job, I think you you go through another person’s story when someone can articulate feelings you felt, even though the situation or story is different, I think that can be really healing. So what I want readers to hopefully take away from this is a piece of themselves better understood.
It’s been a terrific year, and I’m happy to share all of the insights that I’ve learned along the way. But I’m going to focus, of course, on kind of memoir writing tonight. So quick tip if you ever want to do it, take a sip of your wine, take a bite of cheese or chocolate or any food. Then go back to your wine and you’ll be amazed at how the taste of the wine has changed. Try that as a little homework experiment this week.
All right, memoir. Mistake number one. With memoir, I think the biggest mistake is to assume that your story is the focus of the book. It will probably start off that way. And that’s what drives you to write the book. Something happened in your life, but the end product – the memoir – if you plan to publish it for the broader public and not just your family – which is admirable, you can go that path too – is that it has to be larger than that. I think a lot of people get also confused memoir with autobiography or biography. Memoir is a slice in time, whereas autobiography or biography starts at the beginning and then goes all the way through a life, whether it’s yours or somebody else’s. So what you need to ask yourself is, do you have a central story or a series of anecdotes? Because what you don’t want to do is just what I call the to do list. Like, we did this and then we did this and then this happened. Then this happened. There’s got to be some themes, larger themes, threading through.You can still have anecdotes in your book, but that can’t be the whole thing.
And my first two books were nonfiction first person, but they were not memoirs, even though they were about my travels to different wine regions. Memoir was an entirely different animal and genre that I had to learn. One of the smartest pieces of advice that I got while I was writing my memoir was, it’s not what happened to you, it’s what you did with it. So of course you’re going to tell what the central story is. But what readers are looking for is how did you recover or how did you respond or what did you think? What were your reflections? What can I take away from this? So even though the story specifics may differ, there’s some universal themes and feelings. So in my case, my no good, terrible, very bad vintage started with my divorce from my husband of 20 years at the beginning of the year and it ended with an online mobbing from rivals for my career. Reading this book, you may not have experienced a divorce, but you’ve probably felt loneliness and the longing for love. You may not have been mobbed online. I hope you have not been. But you’ve probably at some point felt fear of the future or career despair, or just uncertainty.
And so those feelings, when someone can capture those feelings into words and then bundle that with reflections on how you dealt with those feelings, that’s what a reader is looking for in memoir. Your story is gravy. So the reader takeaways in terms of what they’re looking for are really critical. So when I set out to write this book, at first I didn’t. I wasn’t going to. It was like vandalizing my own privacy. But then the story kept ricocheting around in my mind for five years. And then I was hearing stories from other women, not just in the wine industry, but in finance, tech, sport, the military and the feelings and the themes were the same. Similar specifics were different. So that’s what propelled me. But what made it really useful for readers were the takeaways and tips. So the reflections I talked to, the articulation of feelings some people just can’t name what they’re feeling.
Natalie MacLean (00:56:57) – There’s a book named Hungry Ghosts. They haunt us if we can’t name something. So I didn’t intend to write a self-help book. And there are hybrid memoirs that do this, but in the end a lot of the reader response coming through, whether it’s direct messages or emails, are about the tips that I put in there in terms of how I dealt with my divorce, how I dealt as a wine professional who drinks for a living. How I moderated my own alcohol consumption after I realized I had an issue with it. Again, just coming back to that sort of point, the first draft is probably therapy for you, but the final copy is therapy or the benefit is for the reader.
So the tips, just to give you examples of what was in my book that readers resonated with and took away, was how did I address the depression from the divorce and the anxiety from the online mobbing. I had several of my therapy sessions in the book, and so it could be a fly in the wall listening to this. I also included tips on cutting back drinking, so things like if I opened a full bottle of wine, I would pour a half bottle or half of it into a half empty bottle. To be more mindful of how much I was drinking and to keep it fresh for the next day, because I would get into that mindset of, oh, I’ve opened this, so why not will drink at all like finishing the peas off your plate. And that really put a stop to that. Things like asking myself what was the thought before the thought that said I need a drink. Because usually if you back up a couple of thoughts, it was frustration or exhaustion or I deserve this. It wasn’t about just relaxing and having a nice glass of wine with friends or family. So all of those tips were what were resonating with people. It’s the reflections and insights.
It’s also telescoping time because with memoir, Glennon Doyle said, you need to write from a scar not an open wound. And I love that. There’s a term for memoirs that are just all awful things that happen to me. Misery memoir. It’s just like a dump. Like somebody threw it all up on the beach unprocessed and unresolved. You get the sense that the author is still in the middle of her mess, and that’s not helpful to the reader. So you need the distance of time to pull back and say, okay, let’s look at what happened back then. What if I learned, how am I different? And that’s what the reader is doing. What can I take from what happened to her and maybe apply it to my own life and some of the things I can’t resist? But I blend humour in everything I write. And sometimes when people are reading this, oh my God, this horrific thing happened to you, and then you can still have humour. How can you can only have humor by having that time write? Comedy is pain plus time. Because when you look back at certain things that have happened in your life, sometimes they’re so absurd that they are almost comical and you can only write with them with that remove that time gives you so the reader take aways.
Natalie MacLean (01:00:16) – You think, okay, what are my reader takeaways going to be? If you’ve created a book proposal for a traditional publisher? My first two were with Penguin Random House. This one was with Dundurn, which is one of the larger independent presses outside the big five in Canada. You need comps, meaning comparable titles, because they want to know what is this book like? Your book is the lovechild of X plus X. What they’re really asking is what is the reader going to get from this? So it’s a mash up of this, plus this. If you like this because of why you love the travel, you love the romance, you loved whatever. Plus this, you love these aspects. That’s what you’re going to get from this book. Just one piece of advice don’t use category killers like Eat, Pray, Love. Everyone wants their memoir to be Eat, Pray, Love. Even though a reviewer did call my book that, butt I would not call my book that because it’s just publishers won’t believe it, or wild or educated or whatever.
Natalie MacLean (01:01:17) – So you choose books that are relatable, recent, and hint at what the reader is going to get. That can be part of your book blurb on the back, which is so fundamental to selling your book to both a publisher and to the final reader. So I’ve got way too many in here, but this was in my proposal: Wine Witch On Fire is a blend of Sex and the City reboot meeting Girlfriends Guide to Divorce. They sit down at a local bar to compare relationship notes around the corner. Kitchen confidential. Confidential eavesdrops and warns the women about the secret misogyny in the wine and food world. Drinking a love story chimes in on the dangers of overconsumption, and the bartender men explain things to me, rolls her eyes and pours them another glass of Pinot. So it’s just trying to give you a sense of what might come through in the book, the themes and the tone.
Natalie MacLean – I’ll publish Part Two of the workshop next week. You also won’t want to miss next week when we chat with Master of Wine and author Anne Krebiehi about the wines of Germany. If you liked this podcast 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 what really happens in the vineyard during each season and including that magical mix of bats, bees, sheep, pigs, and humans.
It’s easy to find my podcast. Just tell them to search for Natalie MacLean Wine on their favourite podcast app, or they can listen to the show on my website. Thank you for taking the time to join me here. I hope something great is in your glass this week, perhaps a wine shaped by fog. 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.
