Rex Pickett's Blog, page 2

Sideways NZ: August 2, 2022

Fat Sally’s Pub & Grill.

I was hoping to blog my Sideways NZ: The Road Back novel research road trip, but every day has been so filled – exhilarating, exhausting, thrilling, dismaying (at times), wondrous, magical (yes, lucky breaks) – that by the time I called it quits for the day I had nothing left in the tank.  And then mornings brought me a whole new round of challenges.

After an extended preparatory stay, I departed July 12th from Prophet’s Rock Winery guest cottage just east of Cromwell in Central Otago (south of the South Island of New Zealand).  I had been checked out on a beautiful camper van loaned out by Maryann Liddell of Pacific Horizon Motorhomes.  The camper van is outfitted with everything from a shower/bathroom to a two-burner stove to two sleeping compartments, tons of storage, satellite WiFi and TV.  It was surprisingly easy to drive down the washboard dirt road out of Prophet’s Rock to the main highway.  Unless you’re close to a major city, NZ is almost exclusive one-lane roads with minimal shoulders, and sometimes no shoulders at all.  The camper van probably weighs five tons, is taller, and wider, than you think.

En route to Oamaru and The Tough Guy Book Club (yes, you read that correctly) I stopped at a gas station to fuel up on diesel.  It was raining.  It was cold.  At the gas station there was a flurry of activity.  I heard voices talking about the pass being closed.  Cars and trucks were coming down the mountain, not going up.  A guy named Rob pointed up at the pass I was about to ascend.  It was whited out.  With snow!  I told him I needed to get to Oamaru and The Tough Guy Book Club and he looked at me strangely.  He told me unless I had a helicopter I might as well return to Prophet’s Rock and light a fire.  This was not a good start.

Fortunately, there were problem solvers.  My driver and co-captain on this first leg of the trip was hunkered down with a woman named Zara (who might go down as the savior of this trip!) and they were working Google Maps on their dueling iPhones.  I eavesdropped on what they were strategizing.  There indeed was another route, albeit twice as long.  They kept scrolling along the route looking for potential road closures.  I learned later we had begun the trip in a beastly storm that would drop 4” of rain in one day on a very arid Central Otago (avg. rainfall about 15”).  

After the strategizing session revealed no road closures on the alternative route, we turned around and took the “Pig Route” to Oamaru in savage winds and freezing rain that fell intermittently between snow flurries and slanting rain.  Sharing driving, I braved 30 mph wind gusts that perilously buffeted the camper van from left to right on those narrow roads and made it to Oamaru, a charming town on the east coast of the South Island of NZ.  Charming if it’s in the summer!  Feral in the winter.  Desolate streets.  Rain that hits you like projectiles from a cluster bomb.  I honestly believe had I not had an asst./driver with me I would not have braved the six-hour alternative “Pig Route” and the trip would have been off to such a disastrous start that there might be no Sideways NZ: The Road Back.  It was that barbarous of a start, and I kept thinking dark thoughts about how I was ever going to make it to Cook’s Strait and the North Island.

But, we made it to Oamaru and stopped in at Star & Garter restaurant, a charming British-style country restaurant and warmed ourselves over some terrific country fare.  My brain was fried.  Glancing outside, I had serious doubts about staying in a camper van.  But before we could decide whether to break down and get a hotel, it was off to Fat Sally’s Pub & Restaurant where a dozen of the lone NZ chapter of The Tough Guy Book Club were waiting for me, a hearty group of guys, half of them ordering ales as if they had bought vouchers for infinite refills.

The Tough Guy Book Club began in Australia and bills itself as the “fight club for your mind.”  When I had heard about the event from one of my publicists, the name alone made me cry out:  “Sign me up!”  Little did I know …

The Tough Guy Book Club of Oamaru, NZ Discussing Sideways.

First, some context:  Over two years ago I was contacted by a gentleman named Youssef Mourra, a Kiwi now, via Australia and Lebanon.  He is a big Sideways fan, and he wondered if I had any thoughts about bringing my iconic characters Miles and Jack, or at least my alter-ego Miles, to NZ.  Due to Covid and other factors it took over two years for it to happen.  But once it was appearing as though it was going to become a reality I automatically started ideating the novel.  Would Miles get an assignment to go to NZ?  Or would he begin there, as writer friend Marco Mannone suggested?  I decided to go with Marco’s idea as I wrote about in my previous blog.  I then came up with the idea that Miles gets some shocking (not tragic, but shocking) news and he has to return to California.  But before he returns he has to go on this promised book tour for this Kiwi, or Aussie, publisher.  However, instead of the Stagecoach bus and the five-star hotels Miles has been promised, Jack shows up in a … camper van.  And the camper van idea was writer friend Kate Sabin’s brainstorm.  Now, Youssef (Youie) had to get me a camper van.  He didn’t disappoint.  Now, in order to research the ideated novel, I had to drive it!  All the way up NZ and maybe across the Tasman Sea to Australia.

All my life’s work has been road movies or road novels.  It all started when I saw Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, a 3-hour road movie that blew me away.  There are times I wish I had never seen it.  Road movies are hard to make, especially on low budgets.  Road novels are easier to write.  Unless you have to research them from the ground up!

Sideways NZ: July 11, 2022

Leaving Prophet’s Rock – Thank You Pacific Horizon Motorhomes.

The Sideways NZ novel research road trip begins.  Thanks to Pacific Horizon Motorhomes and a whole host of other great Kiwis it’s finally happening.  Today, I’m disembarking from Central Otago (south of the South Island of New Zealand and prime Pinot Noir country) and heading north.  Miles (my alter ego) is on a book tour with Jack.  A bit of a bait-and-switch with the parsimonious publisher and they’ve dismayingly ended up in a camper van instead of the rock star bus and the five-star hotels they had been promised.  This is a real road trip that will then be alchemized into fiction.  I have to live it in order to write it.  There are things that happen in real life that can’t be made up.  I will fictionalize, and I will take liberties, but I don’t like to abstract things out of thin air.  I prefer to draw from reality.

A lot of events are lined up for this massive, 1,000-mile research road trip.  The first night will be a book signing of Sideways at Fat Sally’s Bar & Restaurant hosted by the Tough Guy Book Club (I can’t make up any of these names) in Oamaru on the east coast of New Zealand.  Just confirmed an event a week later at the Welsh Dragon Bar in Wellington, an institution, and one I’m really thrilled about.  Many more book clubs and winery visits along the way too numerous to list.  Thanks to archivist and write Kate Saeed for the idea of the camper van (if I go over a cliff, she’s to blame!).  And thanks to writer Marco Mannone for the idea of my Miles starting in Central Otago.

Prophet’s Rock in All its Wintry Glory.

Central Otago has been an eye-opener.  As I’ve written, it is stunningly beautiful, even in winter.  I’m told every season is epically different and spectacularly gorgeous in its own right.  I believe it.  But, there’s a novel to research, a novel to write, with Blackstone Publishing hovering above me waiting that first draft.  This is not a vacation, though at times it feels like one.  I’m on the qui vive for material wherever I go, whomever I meet.

The camper van arrived last night and I got checked out on it and I depart with a great support team because if it was just me I’d probably be having a panic attack – I’m not exactly the camper, backpacking, van life type.  However, I am a road movie guy.  A long time ago I saw Kings of the Road, a three-hour road movie directed by the great Wim Wenders.  It is incontrovertibly the ultimate road movie.  As soon as I saw it I knew what I wanted to do the rest of my life:  make road movies.  I made two in the analog days, one a 1,000-mile road movie (California Without End) and the second a 4,000 road movie, From Hollywood to Deadwood (Island Pictures).  When those two films nearly killed me and destroyed my marriage I turned to road novels.  There’s something about the open road, something about that next unknown stop.  A road novel almost always buys you conflict through automatic change of scenery and setting.  But there still have to be characters, a story, a spine to that story.  The road trip doesn’t write the novel, but it supplies the grist.  I know the spine to Sideways NZ, I now just have to live its, forgive the word, entrails, in order to write it.

The prepping and planning is over, but this trip will be unrehearsed.  Though there are now locked obligations, anything that takes me off the beaten path, or the set itinerary, will happen.  I will go where this novel takes me; i.e., where my imagination takes me.  I know where I’m going, I just don’t know how I’m going to get there.  

Here we go!

Sideways NZ: June 26, 2022

Dreaming Sideways NZ:  The Road Back

I’m bivouacked here at Prophet’s Rock Winery’s guest cottage, 15 miles outside of Cromwell (in the south of the South Island of New Zealand), a beautiful drive along Lake Dunstan, then three miles up a sinuous graded dirt road to where I’m staying.  I am all alone.  There is literally no one within a mile of me.  Since signing a deal with Blackstone Publishing before boarding the plane to NZ in mid-May, I have had my antennae out for material for Sideways NZ: The Road Back.  The first five weeks in NZ were a whirlwind of wine tastings and meeting wonderful people (literate and funny and very wine knowledgeable), but I’ve gone more troglodytic in recent days in order to plunge into the writing head-space I need to occupy in order to write this Sideways sequel.

Writer Madison Smaart Bell once wrote in a great essay on writing that you have to keep the instrument tuned so that when inspiration strikes you’re ready.  I’ve kept my instrument tuned by writing blogs, lengthy texts, and emails.  But that’s not fiction writing.  Fiction writing, for me, begins in reality, then transits to the imagination.  I like what Hemingway said about writing The Sun Also Rises:  something to the effect that you have to let it build up inside you until it’s like a pressure cooker about to blow its top, and then you start writing.  I’m of the belief that you want it to come out in a torrent in that first draft.  When I wrote Sideways I could literally see the whole novel in my head.  I didn’t have all the scenes, but the adumbration was there, the scaffolding was there, the locations, the characters, the beginning and ending was there, all I had to do was find that big middle.  And that’s where I’m at as I start to ideate the road trip that my alter ego Miles and his friend Jack will take from the south of the South Island to the north of the North Island of NZ.  Yes, another road trip novel.  I have the opening.  And I have the ending (only my special needs cat Max knows).

Miles, my alter ego, written in first person, and brilliantly played by Paul Giamatti in the Alexander Payne movie, is, I’ve decided, going to begin here at Prophet’s Rock.  It’s a lone cottage on top of a craggy, hardscrabble peak where seemingly nothing grows but grapevines.  It’s winter now and the deciduous vines are barren of foliage.  Miles is sporting a full beard.  He’s standing outside his isolated cottage, all alone, staring down into the fog-wreathed valley.  He owns a hectare of Pinot Noir vines here that his girlfriend winemaker is turning into some of the most exclusive Pinots in the world.  For all intents and purposes he’s left the known world for the far reaches of the southern hemisphere.  But, there’s something amiss in his life.  He’s received some shocking – not tragic, but shocking – news that now has forced him to return to California and the United States where he’s been in a self-imposed exile for a year.  A new novel he’s written at Prophet’s Rock has gone through the editorial process and is about to be published, and the publisher wants to do a book tour in New Zealand, beginning in the south of the South Island and ending in Auckland (north of the North Island), a 1,000-mile road trip snaking through some of the most extraordinarily scenic topography known to planet earth.

Prophet’s Rock, Central Otago, NZ

Miles is of the deluded belief the book tour will be conducted in a kitted-out rock star bus and nights in lavish five star hotels.  But when he sees Jack in a camper van roaring up the dirt road to Prophet’s Rock, a cloud of dust funneling out behind him, it’s clear the trip is not going to be what Miles imagined.  Let the comedy begin!  Miles and Jack have not seen each other since Miles expatriated to New Zealand two  years ago, fatalistically fearing America was doomed to a new, appalling Puritanism with the election of Trump and which he could not abide.  They’ve stayed in touch over email, but sparingly.  Jack, now divorced, has rediscovered his mojo.  He’s fit, he’s healthy, he’s not the louche degenerate we left off in the movie and my sequel books.  And he wants something from Miles.  Doesn’t everybody?

The publisher, at the last minute, in a classic bait-and-switch, has decided to cut costs by renting a camper van, or getting it gratis in a quid pro quo for personal appearances Miles never signed up for.  Something about Miles+Jack in a camper van on a book tour of New Zealand spoke to me.  Both my two indie feature films are road movies.  All my novels, except for The Archivist, are road novels; and even The Archivistis a road novel of the unconscious of the main character, and of this author himself.  As a writer I need for things to go wrong to find the comedy.  I can envision things going wrong in that camper van.  Throw in a woman publicist who operates in a kind of controlled chaos Miles finds bewildering and disconcerting and the table is set.  I’ll find the drama, I’ll reveal Miles’s shocking secret, I’ll show you New Zealand like no one in the U.S. has seen it, but I need for things to go awry.  The camper van buys me that.  It’s the via regia to the comedy I’m looking for.  We’ll have to see what happens on that trip.  It begins July 12th.

The idea of starting with Miles all alone in New Zealand is attributed to my writer friend Marco Mannone (give credit where credit is due).  The idea of Miles+Jack in a camper van is the brainstorm of Kate Saeed, the archivist who processed my papers for installation in Geisel Library, and the inspiration for The Archivist, and a writer in her own right.  When Kate had the idea of Miles+Jack in a camper van I ran it by numerous friends who know my work and fans of the movie.  There was almost instant laughter picturing these two grown men bunking together in a camper van on a wild, 1,000-mile road trip of book clubs teeming with wine-soaked Kiwi women, winery tasting room visits of course, all against a backdrop this sublime New Zealand scenery.

This is the ideation process.  To Be Continued …

Sideways NZ: June 18, 2022

Aotearoa New Zealand’s Central Otago wine region – on the south of the South Island – is remarkably new.  Serious viticulture didn’t begin until the late seventies, according to legend Alan Hardy and the inestimable Rudi Bauer of famous Quartz Reef Wines.  Vinifiable grapes didn’t arrive until the early eighties.  Central Otago is barely four decades old.  In contrast, Burgundy has been making wine for nearly a millennium!  Bear in mind, winemaking bears little resemblance to brewing beer or distilling spirits which can be produced year round.  Wine follows the circadian rhythms of the four seasons.  Spring is budbreak; summer is for ripening; fall is sitting on the edge of panic waiting for the phenolic ripeness and sugar levels to come into balance for harvest; in winter the grapes go to sleep, are pruned in their hibernation in preparation for the next annual cycle.  There are no shortcuts.  You only have one year to get it right, and whatever subjective choices you made in the winter and spring you will die on that hill in the fall, in victory or defeat.  This is the beauty and the poetry of wine that surpasses any other alcoholic beverage in its sublimity.  To some it’s just fermented grape juice; to others it’s a life, wedded to a distinct topography, at the mercy of the climate, crucified on the cross of subjective decisions that will spell the fate of next year’s vintage.  It is a profession not for the faint of heart.

Enter Yoshiaki Sato.  He and his wife Kyoko came to New Zealand from the banking world looking, like so many, to live a more personally fulfilling life liberated from the soul-destroying burden of a 9-6 job that had no hope of ever etching one’s own unique footprint onto something that would be remembered.  Sato knew nothing about wine when he came to NZ, but he started taking courses, got jobs at wineries, was enthralled by the challenge, by this stunningly beautiful Central Otago terroir.  Five years ago he bought a tiny parcel of 3.2 hectares (a mere eight acres) on a craggy hilltop outside Cromwell.  Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are the king and queen of Central Otago because of the region’s temperately old climate and metamorphic schist soils where grapes need to struggle to achieve their finest expression, so it was a surprise when Sato told he had also planted some Chenin Blanc (makes sense), Gamay (huh?), and Cabernet Franc (the only winemaker in Central Otago to plant Cab Franc).

Yoshiaki Sato, viticulturist, vintner, Sato Wines. 

Sato is a hardcore biodynamist.  To him, any form of intervention in the winemaking process is a profanity.  He and his wife spend way more time in the vineyard than they do in the cellar.  He will not let anyone else prune his eight acres except he and his wife.  He is the only winemaker I’ve met who, by choice, uses a basket press, and he makes a compelling argument for why all grapes would benefit from this labor-intensive method, its gentler pressing technique resulting in softer wines with fewer of the harsher phenolics found in larger bladder presses that then require fining and filtration, anathema to Sato.

Sato Wines is small production, preposterously young and still vinifying their first vintages with some of their varieties.  Sato asked me what I wanted to taste.  He only wanted to open one bottle at his new facility, which will one day have a proper tasting room and will be swarming with oenophile tourists on this craggy slope overlooking Dunstan Lake and the, in June, snow-capped mountains to the distance.  Even though I’m pigeon-holed as a Pinotphile because of Sdeways I said I wanted to taste his inaugural Cab Franc (’19, 16 months in barrel), since it’s the only one made in Central Otago.  From three-year-old vines!  In the glass it was a midnight purple.  In the mouth, like almost all Central Otago wines, you could taste the quartz and mica its rootstock suffers mightily to ripen in.  It tasted unlike any Cab Franc I’ve ever had.  When asked, Sato said it tasted like matter below the forest floor, like plums that had ripened underground.  Sato explained to me that the wine will be different every year as the vines mature and the taproots wriggle ever deeper into these hardscrabble soils that consist of less than 5% organic matter.  

Sato Wines, 2019 Chardonnay, Sato Piso Vineyard, Central Otago.  

Sato is making wines at the edge of the world with a fierce loyalty to, and respect for, the land, the terroir.  He is an stubborn believer in wine expressing place and year.  Period.  No tartaric; no over-ripeness and watering back; no phenolic manipulation with centrifuges; no fining agents; clusters from his hands carried mere meters to his winery for vinification.  He told me, with a burden of spirit and heartache in his narrowing eyes, about last year’s six-hour gale force winds in the middle of harvest that annihilated many of his beautifully-ripped clusters.  He is braving the elements for the wines he believes in.  Call him the second wave of Central Otago.

Where I’m At

The first three weeks in New Zealand has been hectic.  After arriving in Auckland mid-May I made my way all the way to the bottom of the South Island to the fabled wine region of Central Otago, an argument whether it’s the southern-most wine region in the world up for debate, but close enough to qualify.  This is a very dry, but temperate, climate, bounded by gorgeous, snow-capped mountains on both sides to protect it from the two oceans’ frigolic influences.

View from Prophet’s Rock Winery guest house.

I know that some of you following this blog are interested in my novel ideation process for Sideways NZ.  Even though I’m bringing my now iconic characters Miles and Jack to New Zealand I still have to find the story.  Like all writers we have bursts of ideas, adumbrate, discard, begin over, ad infinitum.  In my case I let it build in my head until I think I have sufficiently adumbrated it – beginning; the rough outline of the big middle; and the ending.  I have to have an ending.  I will not begin a novel or a screenplays without an ending.  I have my ending!  Miles (Paul Giamatti in the movie and first-person alter ego Miles) learns a shocking, but not tragic, truth, that he must face.  Jack has regrouped from his divorce – that was inevitable! – and has sold a novel of Miles’s to a film production company.

Originally, I was planning to have Miles and Jack fly to New Zealand and begin a 1,000 mile road trip in a camper van.  That’s still on the table.  The road trip will be a promotional book signing for Miles and his latest book, but things in NZ are not as one might imagine.

These hardscrabble Pinot Noir-planted soils.

In NZ I’m being hosted here in Central Otago by wonderful people, all of them vineyard owners or winemakers.  One of the first places I was a guest at was Prophet’s Rock Winery.  Picture a lone guest house perched atop a hill surrounded by almost exclusively Pinot Noir vines.  In fact, Pinot Noir is the only red wine variety – with rare exceptions that are mostly unsuccessful – that will ripen in this extraordinarily hardscrabble terroir.

After a three-mile drive up sinuous dirt switchbacks to the guest house, thinking like a writer, I immediately flashed on an idea by my writer friend Marco Mannone (The Haunting of Nicholas Cage) that Miles should begin in New Zealand.  And when I arrived at Prophet’s Rock’s guest house and saw the deciduous vines shorn of their leafage I could glimpse it:  Miles (me) has left the known world and journeyed to the farthest reaches of the planet, a planet he believes, in his inimitably fatalistic worldview, is doomed.  With a modest amount of savings he has bought half a hectare of Pinot Noir vines.  Look at the photos.  This land is almost nonarable.  It’s an understatement to say the grapevines suffer.  There is less than 3% organic matter in these metamorphic schist soils.  Central Otago is not only sublimely beautiful, from vineyard to vineyard to vineyard, but it is Pinot Noir, still my favorite grape, cultivated, and vinified, truly at the end of the world by people who scoff derisively at any mention of manipulation.  They are true purists down here.

 I said I would make no sheep jokes in Sideways NZ, but this Kiwi beat me to it.

But all is not well in Miles’s world – we need conflict, because in conflict we have drama, in conflict we mine comedy, and then, ultimately, find resolution – and Jack has flown halfway across the world, over the equator into the southern hemisphere to rescue his friend.  Let the jollity begin!

Sideways NZ

Hi Sideways fans,
It’s been two years in the making, but I’m finally jetting off to New Zealand to research and write Sideways NZ.  I just closed a book deal with Blackstone Publishing – the publisher of my current novel The Archivist – which I’m very excited about.  I don’t know what Miles+Jack will find in New Zealand, but I will be blogging my research here in diary form, and will be vouchsafing you an inside look at my creative process as this novel takes shape.  I hope you will bookmark this tab and come here for frequent updates.  I promise writing in my inimitably personal voice, as well as spectacular accompanying photos of my novel research journey.

The photo above is my cat Max.  He’s barely over a year.  He’s a rescue and has a metabolic bone disorder known as congenital rickets.  Fortunately I’ve found someone to take care of him because he’s a special needs cat.  He doesn’t have the use of his back legs like normally-developed felines, and he has to take supplement every day that must be orally administered.  Other than that, he lives a normal life, but I know we will miss each other.  I don’t mean to wax sentimental, but Max is my first pet since I was a kid and I love the little guy.

Anyway, barring a – God forbid! – positive test, I’m off to New Zealand.  I’ve heard their wines are incredible – especially the Pinots in Central Otago – and the scenery is jaw-dropping.  it’s a tough job – wine-tasting, sightseeing – but there is a novel to write, there is a deadline, and I already feel the pressure.  But, it’s a welcome pressure, a salubrious pressure, the kind that all artists need to educe the best out of them.

Rex Pickett

Sideways London

Dear Friends and Sideways fans,

Alas, I haven’t blogged in a while.  My apologies.  My life has been insanely busy.  I’m going to begin blogging a diary on the First Class staging of my Sideways play at the St. James Theatre in London.  Opening Night is May 31.  I fly over for rehearsals, which begin April 27, the Saturday before.  Tickets are selling, I’m told, at a record pace.  I’ve never been so excited in all my life!  From poetry to indie filmmaking to screenwriting to novels to … inexplicably, playwriting!  I guess there is a fourth act to the writing life.  And this one has been the most creatively reward of all.

The above images are the poster artwork for the play.  The image on the right is the marquee of the St. James Theatre and the poster artwork of the play.  The St. James is a 312 seat theater and the play will run from May 31 to July 9, and possibly be extended if it does well.

The director is David Grindley and the incomparable cast is, of course, entirely U.K.  Here they are below.  All so accomplished.  I’m thrilled and nervous to meet them April 27.  I’m sure they’ll want to hear everything Sideways, and, of course, those who know me, know that I won’t hold anything back.

Again, this was just a re-initiation to my diary posts of the past, so I’m going to leave it short.  But now that I’m back up to speed, I’ll be posting these on the usual social media sites (Twitter, most notably).

London, here I come.  Cheers and check back for inside info on everything Sideways the play.

 

Ilaria Anichini (Winemaker, Fattoria di Montemaggio)

Almost six months ago I received an email from a young Italian film producer, Nicola de Angelis, based in Rome. He was interested in my coming to Italy to write a movie. I get offered all kinds of things, receive all kinds of strange emails through my website, so I didn’t believe the email when I first read it. Six months later I believe it.

I am now in the heart of Tuscany, Chianti Classico (more on this later in future blogs), and am staying — and writing! — in a castle, Castello d’Albola to be precise. Tuscany is very rural. The architecture has been beautifully preserved, and in some cases restored, to its midieval origins. This is an enchanted land, heartstoppingly beautiful, and blows away any other wine region I have ever been to, including Napa/Sonoma and, yes, the Santa Ynez Valley, where Sideways was shot. If all goes well, there will be a movie set here for all to see.

As part of my “research” I am to visit winemakers, as many as I can visit. There are over 350 wineries in the Chianti Classico zone of the Tuscany region alone — and there are 21 regions in Italy, alone! Oh, and add to that the fact that there are over 135 vinifiable grapes in the country of Italy. Whew! It’s not an easy country to understand when it comes to wine. Labeling can be abstruse, as it can be in Germany, but at least in Germany you’re dealing principally with one grape: Riesling. However, the good news is, here in Tuscany you’re dealing with principally one grape also: Sangiovese. Yes, there are other grapes, but they are, at best, tertiary characters. And, it’s true, there is a fair amount of Cabernet Sauvignon and even … Merlot. Don’t hate me! But the workhorse grape here is Sangiovese.

I needed to understand Sangiovese if I was ever going to understand Tuscany and, in particular, Chianti Classico. And I had to understand Chianti Classico, which is different than Chianti, but more about that later.

One of my first visits was with winemaker — and viticulturalist — Ilaria Anichini. Her 8 hectare (about 20 acres) vineyard sits high atop rolling hills ruling sentinel over one of the most stunning landscapes I have ever visited. It is autumn now and the vineyards are turning ochre, sienna, burnt orange and red. Creeping ivy, also turning brilliant colors of fall, climb the ancient stone walls of the Montemaggio winery property.

Ilaria studied agronomy at the university in Florence, but wine runs in her blood. When you talk with winemakers here in Chianti Classico they talk about the difficulty of the grape, the terroir, how the wine is only a reflection of that terroir. Sangiovese is not really grown in any other part of the world. There’s a tiny amount in California, but without these rocky soils and unique elevations and specific mesoclimate of Tuscany, it’s just a grafting onto a rootstock and has nothing to do with the Sangiovese that is grown here in Tuscany.

When she talks about winemaking, Ilaria doesn’t prattle on about pH’s or Brix. Though she uses modern viticultural chemical analyses, for her it’s all about instinct, taste, and, well, feel, soul. For her, wine is about the weather the year gave her. 2014 was a difficult year because there was a lot of rain during the summer months, which created some problems in the vineyard. When I think of the Santa Ynez Valley, I don’t think it terms of vintages. In fact, I can’t remember one vintage from the other because the years are so consistent in terms of rainfall — when it comes — and days of sunshine. Here in Tuscany, that’s not so. Also, in the Santa Ynez Valley, wine is heavily manipulated. When I told Ilaria that certain winemakers will bring their Pinot Noir to extremely high levels of ripeness which, when inoculated with yeast — it’s all wild yeast here in Tuscany, for the most part — and then they have to “water it back” to get the alcohol to acceptable levels she looked at me as if she’d seen a ghost. A ghost of commoditization of taste, a ghost of, well, fraud. When I inform her that you only have to be 75% of a grape to call it by that grape and you can, as some winemakers do, add Syrah to the Pinot Noir to give it shoulders she just shakes her head in dismay. I tell her that it gets worse. If the acid goes down because they let the ripening go to far they just add tartaric acid to give their wine more sparkle, she looks appalled.

Ilaria Anichini is salt of the earth. Her grapes never see irrigation. She uses almost no new oak, mostly neutral oak, because she wants as little interference as possible in the flavor profile of her wine. Her riserva — an astonishingly earthy wine — comes from the highest vineyards on Montemaggio’s property. There, the grapes, in her words, “suffer.” The yields are low. Even lower after she looses bunches. When her grapes are ready for harvest they are all hand sorted. Unripe, and over-ripe, berries are plucked from the clusters and discarded. And she doesn’t pick all at once like they do in California. She and her vineyard workers will go into the vineyards over a period of days and only pick the ripe bunches, leaving the others to hang for a few extra days.

When I talk to Ilaria I feel like I’m talking to a great, uncompromising artist. For her, her wine is not about how much money she can make by over-cropping, watering back, slapping a label on it like so many wineries in California do. For her it is all about the quality. Her riservas age three years in barrel and bottle, and usually at least two in barrel, something that is rare in California because, well, that is inventory sitting in those barrels. For her, it is about the wine, about making the best wine she can from the vintage that the gods gave her that year.

Ilaria Anichini is one of the reasons that Tuscany is moving away from the “super Tuscan” description that we Americans gave to some of their more powerful wines to fall in lock-step with the Robert Parker hegemony of a wine palate that likes over-extracted, food-unfriendly, wines. Ilaria is building wines to age — the tannins in her Sangiovese are very evident — but also wines to drink, drink with food. Because in Italy — and I’ve only been here a week now — wine is produced to be enjoyed with food. To Italians, wine is food.

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"Vertical" Wins Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal for Fiction!

   My Sideways sequel Vertical just won the Independent Pubishher Book Awards Gold Medal in the category Popular Fiction.  This means a lot to me, because it’s redemption from having the supposedy august Alfred A. Knopf treat me like the scum of the earth and, more or less — I’m blogging about it on Huffington Post Books — forcing me out of my contract because they refused to publish it if I insisted, among other things, on my ending.  

   I rest my case, Knopf and Jordan Pavlin (sr. ed. who treated me like dirt).