Brian Doyle's is the first byline I learned to look for in the Oregonian when I moved here, and I still get an anticipatory flutter when I see it. He's recently written a novel, [b:Mink River|9250050|Mink River|Brian Doyle|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1285262402s/9250050.jpg|14130561] and I went to Powell's to listen to him talk. He's an insanely intense and achingly vulnerable speaker who laughs and cries at his own stories. I found out then that he has published several books of essays, and I ordered them all from the library. This is the first one I got, and I dove right in.

I love his tumbling run-on enthusiastic wordy true fine style. I love his unabashed love for his family and his species and his planet and his religion and his wine. I love the way he can make me laugh and cry all at once.

This collection of essays follows the course of a year at the Lange Winery in the Dundee Hills of Oregon, and it is a purely lovely journey. Doyle is never absent from any of his essays, he is so mindfully present that you are too. His words roost in my heart and make it gladder. I've ordered a copy of this book for my own library. 4.5 stars. ( )

Brian Doyle spent a year hanging around one of Oregon’s premier wineries, getting to understand the winemakers, the process of making wine, and the almost mystic quest for The Best Pinot Noir Wine in the World. The result of his observations and pondering is The Grail.

Doyle focused on pinot noir because it is the wine that Oregon is famous for. The well-drained, volcanic soil of Yamhill County is capable of producing pinots to rival wines from the Burgundy region of France. Oregon wineries produce a wide variety of wines, but pinots can make a winery famous – or drive the winemaker crazy. As Doyle learned, pinot noir grapes are the divas of the vineyard.

Doyle’s pinot schoolhouse was Lange Estate Winery and Vineyards in the Red Hills of Dundee, Oregon. Winemakers Jesse Lange and his father Don were patient and erudite teachers who explained to Doyle, not only the technical side of how to grow grapes and make wine, but the poetic and personal side of their business as well. Doyle augments their information with chapters on various related topics such as the history of the region, pinot noir from around the world, and his own musings on words, wine, dogs, friends, and spirituality.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader. ( )

Maybe I was a little jealous (Oregonian wines are in scarce supply where I live) because as much as I wanted to love this book, I struggled with the author's florid writing style. While the subject of the book is primarily pinot, Doyle's meandering descriptions and bubblings over reminded me more of warm champagne. But perhaps that's just me: Doyle is no hack and his love for Oregonian wine and wine makers is abundantly clear. If nothing else, Doyle's book left me determined to seek out and taste the wines he so passionately describes!

I'm currently reading Marq de Villiers book on pinot noir, "The Heartbreak Grape, Revised and Updated: A Journey in Search of the Perfect Pinot Noir". I highly recommend this story of how Josh Jensen brought Burgundian pinot noir to California and created the Calera Wine Company. ( )

I really wanted to like this book about a local Oregon author spending a year hanging out at one of the Willamette Valley's premier wineries, learning about what it takes and means to make wine. There were some subtle clues on the cover that it wouldn't be a great book. I know we are not supposed to judge books by their covers, but I I wish I had. To start, the cover design is as lazy, derivative and as stupid as they get.

Here is my guess of the conversation that went on between the book designers:

A. We gotta do this cover for Oregon State University Press before five.

B. Ahh!! That's an hour and a half away! Those cheap jerks get a discount, let's put it off.

A. We've been putting them off for months and now they have a press date of next Tuesday. Let's just get busy and knock it out. What's it called?

B. The Grail.

A. Oh, piece of cake. Some knight clipart, decorative scrollwork, boom, Fedex, done.

B. Wait...it's about wine.

A. Wine?

B. Yep.

A. The drink wine?

B. Yeah.

A. Wine, huh? What a stupid title. Ok, let's just toss a cork on a buff background, boom. We still make FedEx.

B. That's kinda overdone, don't you think? Just like the bunch of grapes, or the glass getting filled with red.

A. Maybe. I got it: the title's short, let's put it on the cork like it's the name of the vineyard.

B. Are you kidding? A cork is an uneven surface; It'll take me hours in Photoshop to make the type look even close to natural.

A. Dude, it's OSU Press so 1) nobody is going to read it, and 2) even if they did, nobody is going to notice. Type it, rotate it, boom.

B. Ok, you don't care if the type looks awful, fine, but what does your ugly cork have to do with the Grail?

A. I don't know. Do we have any more text, maybe give us a clue?

B. Let's see...the subhead is supposed to read "A Year Ambling & Shambling Through an Oregon Vinyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wild World." Dude, who writes this crap? Ambling and shambling...whole wild world...sheesh.

A. Oh, I get it, the best wine is like the holy grail. Let's stick a halo over the cork, but the halo is a wine stain.

B. Wine spills don't look like halos, guy.

A. Sure they do. You know, like when you put your coffee cup down and it leaves a ring.

B. That's coffee. Unless you're drinking your wine out of a coffee cup it's not going to look like that.

A. Yeah whatever, look, the clock is ticking. Find me a picture of a cork, willya?

As the subtitle suggests, this book is preciously written. Here is another sample:

May. A crisp whirling day on the hill, swirls of wind dervishes, hawks sliding sideways suddenly, bursts of robins and juncos on intent secret headlong missions. A robin arrows by my ear at about ten thousand miles an hour and I mutter darkly about its mother being a wanton wicked hussy and Jesse grins.

I could just see the author pushing his keyboard tray away from him after writing that paragraph and sighing in deep satisfaction. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the hissy alliteration sounds like the wind. Do hawks really slide sideways? I thought that they bank, but still go forward. Robins seem like pretty clumsy fliers to me, incapable of bursting or of arrowing. Maybe the juncos, but they are quiet little things, so maybe they wouldn't burst either. And what's with the no comma rule? Is that supposed to be poetic? Would it have killed the guy to separate "secret" and "headlong" with a comma? Oh, sorry, I'm going to be precious, too. What, good sir? No jot? No tittle? And don't get me started on "wanton wicked hussy" and how bad I feel for Jesse.

So what could have been a good read about an interesting subject is really about Brian Doyle and his over-artificed, simpering prose.