Customers say
Customers find this book to be a captivating history lesson about wine, particularly highlighting great wines from native grapes. Moreover, the writing style receives praise for being extremely well written, with one customer noting its vivid language and poetic turns of phrase. Additionally, the book is well-researched, with one customer describing it as required reading for viticulture education, and customers appreciate its engaging pacing and thoughtful character study.
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A quick rundown of this product’s key features:
A rich romp through untold American history featuring fabulous characters, The Wild Vine is the tale of a little-known American grape that rocked the fine-wine world of the nineteenth century and is poised to do so again today.
Author Todd Kliman sets out on an epic quest to unravel the mystery behind Norton, a grape used to make a Missouri wine that claimed a prestigious gold medal at an international exhibition in Vienna in 1873. At a time when the vineyards of France were being ravaged by phylloxera, this grape seemed to promise a bright future for a truly American brand of wine-making, earthy and wild. And then Norton all but vanished. What happened?
The narrative begins more than a hundred years before California wines were thought to have put America on the map as a wine-making nation and weaves together the lives of a fascinating cast of renegades. We encounter the suicidal Dr. Daniel Norton, tinkering in his experimental garden in 1820s Richmond, Virginia. Half on purpose and half by chance, he creates a hybrid grape that can withstand the harsh New World climate and produce good, drinkable wine, thus succeeding where so many others had failed so fantastically before, from the Jamestown colonists to Thomas Jefferson himself. Thanks to an influential Long Island, New York, seed catalog, the grape moves west, where it is picked up in Missouri by German immigrants who craft the historic 1873 bottling. Prohibition sees these vineyards burned to the ground by government order, but bootleggers keep the grape alive in hidden backwoods plots. Generations later, retired Air Force pilot Dennis Horton, who grew up playing in the abandoned wine caves of the very winery that produced the 1873 Norton, brings cuttings of the grape back home to Virginia. Here, dot-com-millionaire-turned-vintner Jenni McCloud, on an improbable journey of her own, becomes Norton’s ultimate champion, deciding, against all odds, to stake her entire reputation on the outsider grape.
Brilliant and provocative, The Wild Vine shares with readers a great American secret, resuscitating the Norton grape and its elusive, inky drink and forever changing the way we look at wine, America, and long-cherished notions of identity and reinvention.
From the Hardcover edition.
Our Top Reviews
Reviewer: David Arbury
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A superbly constructed tale and a must-read for the outsider in your life
Review: “There is the wild earthiness that I love, which seems to conceal within it a hundred unknowable mysteries, but it changes over time as we drink it, a living, breathing thing that opens up like a flower to become softer, more supple – a more subtle and interesting wine.”This wonderful description of a Norton red appears about 2/3 of the way through Kliman’s book, and I can think of no more accurate summary and description of the book itself.The Wild Vine begins with an aggressive – even confrontational – style that lets readers know in no uncertain terms that they are reading a book about earth, a book about sweat and toil, a book about frustration and hard labor gone unrecognized. Bold descriptive snaps introduce the reader to a tale of the Norton grape – “the American grape” – linking its fascinating origins with the struggles of an brash iconoclast Virginia wine maker, and to be honest, the initial impact of Kliman’s prose is bracing…even off-putting.After the story threads are established, just like the Norton wines, the book gentles and reveals great depth. The writing style softens as the story unfolds and branches out to surprising twists and turns, as much psychological as plot-driven. As new themes emerge – fatherhood, obsession, kindred spirits, and commerce all finding common threads through the expanding narrative – Kliman’s own style “opens up like a flower”, revealing a welcome tenderness and genuine affection for his subjects. Kliman also skillfully writes himself into the story, documenting the frustrations of his research as well as his own tumultuous life as he both welcomes the birth of his first son and mourns the loss of his father. It is to his great credit as a writer that his personal experiences never overshadow The Wild Vine but instead give an additional frame of reference – a common and human connection of familial gain and loss – to the lives of the remarkable people who swirl around the history of the Norton in America.With another author, I would be tempted to pass judgment on this unusual approach, calling Kliman out for a “shifting” or “uneven” tone of his book. But the tonal shift is so gradual and so skillfully done that I suspected while reading that it was purposeful; then the above-quoted passage clinched it for me. Todd Kliman has accomplished something rare and wonderful with this book: he has structured his book to mirror the experience of drinking a Norton.Nor do the non-literary comparisons end with wine. Like a piece of classical music, Kliman introduces his themes, and they are interesting enough. However as he develops them, new insights, new angles, new interpretations, even entirely new themes emerge, casting new light on and substantially enriching the initial premise (and promise) of the story. In reading The Wild Vine, I was interested and engrossed by the tales of the Norton and its tangled path through the entirety of American history, but I found myself even more absorbed and moved by the way that he tells that story.Simply put, this is a wonderful book. It is a well-researched history. It is a thoughtful character study. It is a meditation on fatherhood. It is a cautionary and inspirational tale in equal measure. I recommend it to anyone who knows that the good stories are never simple. I recommend it to anyone who has ever taken – or yearns to take – great risks. I recommend it to anyone who finds joy in the undercurrents as well as the currents of a well-crafted book.
Reviewer: M345
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Transgender & American Viticulture
Review: I was very interested in understanding the history of American viticulture. The author certainly sheds light on that forgotten history while telling the stories of various personalities. However, as you approach the final quarter of this book, we see that the main character, Jenni, who is called a woman throughout the rest of the book, is transgender and the author, in my opinion, mistakenly draws a philosophical parallel between transgenderism and viticulture and enology. The author goes into details on the life of Jenni and how he got a surgery and felt free only after surgically transforming into a woman. This could have been left out completely and the book would be fine. I noticed that none of the reviews pointed this out. So if you only want to learn about the history of American wine and the Norton grape you may want to try a different book.
Reviewer: Rhodies
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Enjoy the book, enjoy the wine
Review: The Wild Vine is a book that reinforces interest and exposure to a truly American wine. An exceptional approach to a specific course of American immigration history and future Southeastern and mid-western grape possibilities. The read advances many American social and cultural attitudes that will help us all propel ourselves into the 21st century. The Wild Vine is a compilation of bright, brave, and insightful personalities, to include its author, Todd Kliman. He lets the book roll along forcefully, just as the Norton grapes grow in the fields, taking their time to develop and letting the written end product mature into a wonderful understanding of where we are at this time in the production of the real American wine. Understandably there is concern of enjoying the book without having the option to taste the wine. Though there are now 184 vineyards producing Norton wine in 22 states, access to these wines are somewhat restricted. In a majority of the cases, Norton wine examples can be shipped to many states today. Examples of good Norton wines by state locations that maybe able to ship are: White Oaks (AL); Three Sisters (GA); Elk Creek (KY); Stone Mountain Cellars (PA); Century Farms (TN), Blumenhof, Heinrichshaus, Adam Pushta, Montelle Vineyards who has great case discount prices, Robller, & Stonehill’s Cross J (MO), and Cooper or Chrysalis (VA). After shipment arrives, let the bottles settle down for several days from the trip, and make sure that you let the wine breathe for no less than 30 minutes. Now you have the best of both worlds, ~ a great book and a very enjoyable acquired taste American wine.
Price effective as of Apr 11, 2025 04:02:18 UTC
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