Desperately Seeking Salem

If there is a book that one should absolutely not read while pregnant, chances are good that I have it stashed in my library rotation.

Deformed children?

Check.

Lost pregnancies?

Check.

Doom and gloom?

Most definitely, check.

Give me your destructive narratives your poorly protaganists, your no-win scenarios and I will be drawn to it like dry rot to your front porch. And though every pregnancy book I have read warns strongly against surrounding yourself with books that might bring you down (you’re depressing your baby, too!) I keep picking them up and holding them to my chest and snuggling with them before discovering the scenes and moments that make it oh so clear that this is not a book I should be reading at this moment in my life.

Indeed, my pregnancy canon is looking a little too much like Law & Order: SVU.

The worst book of all? Portland writer Brian Doyle‘s The Grail: A Year Ambling & Shambling through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wide World.

Yes, if you really want to make yourself feel bad about all that you are giving up by having kids, I suggest you read  Mr. Doyle’s frilly, funny, delightfully comprehensive book about the year he spent at Lange Estate Vineyards in the Red Hills.

Doyle’s style can take a little getting used to. After Thomas Mann and James Frey, he’s the world’s biggest fan of the run-on sentence (Check out that subtitle to his book! Even if the marketers are the ones who make up the titles, it is clearly inspired by his prose).

Also, his personality is all over the page. If you don’t go for cheeky writers who don’t take themselves too seriously (and like to see them interacting with serious people), it can grate a bit.

But by a few chapters in, I rather enjoyed sitting at the table with someone so clearly unafraid to take himself out of a story. And what a story it is.

Winemakers! Originally from Iowa! In Oregon! Making the best wine in the world! And doing it that oh-so-Oregonian way of complete commitment to craft without the rubbings of pretension.

Love it.

How unpretentious can they be,  you ask? Well, I’ve heard through the grapevine har har that quite a few of the main players at Lange haven’t even read the book (though they sell it in their tasting room).

And why would they, other than to get a great primer on pinot, a cultural history of the grape, an anthropological study of the winemaker’s persona, and captivating descriptions of vintages that they get to try every single day.

Man, I really need a drink.

I invite someone to take me out for a glass of Lange pinot in exactly 1.5 years.

Make that a bottle.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 10:06 am and is filed under Travel, Wine, You are what you read. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.