I have a confession: I love wine. And I love books. As my Mom used to say, this girl eats books. Here is my idea (drumroll please) to start a wine book club. The only requirement is it be about wine. I want to start us out with The Dark Vineyard: A Novel of the French Countryside by Martin Walker. I picked it for two reasons. One, the idea of living in France has always fascinated me and two, let’s see if I remember any of the French I learned in 13 hours of Francais s’il vous plait from college. Plus, I think it will be fascinating to compare French culture to the Midwest.
When a bevy of winemakers descend on Saint-Denis, competing for its land and spurring resentment among the villagers, the idyllic town—where Benoit “Bruno” Courreges is the town’s only policeman—finds itself the center of an intense drama, with suspicious fires at the agricultural research station that is working on genetically-modified crops.
Two young men—Max, an environmentalist who hopes to make organic wine, and Fernando, the heir to an American wine fortune—become rivals for the affections of Jacqueline, a flirtatious, newly arrived Québécoise student of wine. Events grow ever darker, culminating in two suspicious deaths, and Bruno finds that the problems of the present are never far from those of the past.
Want to join in?
Every month I’ll pick a new book club. Have an idea for a book for the wine book club? Leave it in the comments below. I’ll be using the hashtag: #winebookclub to discuss. I’m looking to read it by Sunday, May 26, 2013. Want to join me? You can purchase The Dark Vineyard: A Novel of the French Countryside through Indie Bound (who supports local bookstores) or if you have a Kindle, the book can be found here.