Mr. Wine Writer, put a cork in it

“THERE are many ways to the recognition of truth,” wrote Isak Dinesen, “and Burgundy is one of them.”

Karen Blixen’s extravagant appraisal of these storied French wines has a long pedigree. In 1370, Petrarch deployed the considerable force of his Latin prose to persuade Pope Urban V to end the so-called Babylonian Captivity and move the papal court back to Rome from Avignon in the South of France. Determined as he was to win the pontiff over, even the formidable poet and humanist had to concede that giving up the local vintage would be a loss to all concerned.

The red Burgundies of France are made from the pinot noir grape, which filmgoers will recall as the fruit that sent the “Sideways” protagonists on their picaresque journey of discovery through California’s Santa Ynez Valley. The great wines of Bordeaux are elegant and sophisticated; the great reds of Burgundy are sophisticated and earthy. In the hands of skillful winemakers, each of the latter region’s vineyards -- the terroirs -- imparts a distinctive character to its wines. The result is almost dizzyingly complex, varied and rich, rather like real life -- or Dinesen’s truth.

Nowadays, fine, sometimes even great, Pinots are produced from vineyards in California, New Zealand, Australia and, particularly, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. In “The Grail,” Portland-based writer and editor Brian Doyle sets out to chronicle a year in the life of one such winery in the Dundee Hills at the valley’s northern end. Winemakers esteem the region’s red soil as among the best for growing world-class pinot noir grapes, and it was designated as Oregon’s first American Viticultural Area.

In the right hands, it might have been a fascinating project. Doyle’s approach, however, is idiosyncratic, and the result is something like a problematic bottle of wine. Some will find it charming and refreshingly unpretentious in a genre -- wine writing -- that tends these days to be surprisingly short on the former and numbingly long on the latter. Others, however, will find Doyle’s prose mannered, cloying and, at times, downright irritating.

In wine writing as in wine drinking, one must make allowances for taste.

Doyle probably is best known as the editor of Portland, the award-winning magazine of Portland University, and as an essayist on Catholic spirituality and saints. He’s essentially a sketch artist of inner landscapes, and the transition to a broader narrative canvas has not been successfully accomplished in this book. At one point, Doyle describes himself as an “essayist by avocation, because the essay is the coolest form there is ....”

Right.

The volume’s subtitle -- “A Year Ambling and Shambling Through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wild World” -- suggests something of the problem right up front: too many adjectives too routinely, even carelessly, chosen, a goofy predilection for pointless rhymes that one assumes is supposed to be playful, and alliteration bordering on the nonsensical. (Take “whole wild world,” for example. A vineyard is a part of the natural world, but it is intensely cultivated and fretted over. It may be many natural things, but it isn’t wild. So what, other than sound signifying nothing, is the point?)

The operative word in that subtitle is “shambling.” Unless you’re hopelessly hooked by the intrinsic charm of the whole enterprise on the page, it’s hard to know what to make of a chapter that opens with a 20-line paragraph -- all one sentence -- that begins: “I wander up to the winery and for once do not speak to a human bean but instead spend hours reading the labels on the bottles .... “

The frustrating thing is that Doyle has selected a nearly ideal subject for his inquiry. The Lange Estate Winery & Vineyards is a family-run operation, father-and-son winemakers -- Don and Jesse -- and wife and mother, Wendy, who runs the business. The elder Lange graduated from the University of Iowa’s writers’ program and made a successful career as a songwriter before turning to grape growing and winemaking in 1987. The family’s 45 acres in the Dundee Hills is prime pinot-growing terroir, and the Langes use their grapes and those grown by neighbors to make a superb range of wines, excellent Pinot Gris and an interesting Chardonnay. They’re passionate about winemaking and about their pursuit of that ideal Pinot Noir alluded to in the title.

Unfortunately, as he informs readers in an early chapter, Doyle gave up fevered reporting and taking copious notes in favor of “ambling” up to the vineyard at intervals and having the Langes tell him “stories,” which are formed into brief chapters. The Langes’ stories can be fascinating, as in Jesse’s descriptions of the vines’ yearly cycle, the different qualities conferred on wines aged in barrels made from different woods and the relentless frenzy of the harvest. The problem is that since Doyle eschews the convention of direct quotation throughout, all this insight is related in paraphrase that, to this reader’s eye, seems maddeningly fragmentary.

Profligate though he is with adjectives, particularly in repetition, Doyle is rather alarmingly slothful when it really counts. Thus one chapter begins: “September. Almost Harvest. The grapes are the darkestblueblackpurple I ever saw, a color that’s hard to find a word for .... “

Oh, try, you want to say. It’s sort of the point of writing.

Here’s what the real thing looks like.

This is A.J. Liebling on Tavel, the great rose of the Cotes du Rhone that once graced the papal tables of Avignon: “Tavel has a rose-cerise robe, like a number of well-known racing silks.... The taste is warm but dry, like an enthusiasm held under restraint, and there is a tantalizing suspicion of bitterness when the wine hits the top of the palate. With the second glass, the enthusiasm gains; with the third, it is overpowering. The effect is generous and calorific, stimulative of cerebration and the social instincts.”

Save the price of this silly book and invest it in one of the Langes’ excellent wines.