"They're killing the vines!" she told me as she shook her head in front of the backdrop of books.

When in Napa over the weekend, I realized I needed to buy a copy of my book as a gift. If I was in Sonoma, this would have been easy. But here I was in the heart of Big Wine. And I was getting paranoid. I tried Napa Valley Wine Hardware where I was told they had an extensive selection of wine books. The guy never heard of mine, "But it sounds good," he said. I called the CIA in Greystone, and struck out there as well. I tried the ultra-sweet independent book store in St. Helena--River House Books. They had a table packed with the recent releases and mine was not there. I was beginning to think conspiracy. The owner of the book store approached, "Can I help you?" she asked. I told her I needed to buy a copy of The Battle for Love and WIne or How I Saved the World From Parkerization. She said she was pretty certain she had sold out. She checked and sure enough all four copies were gone. Why were they not replenished? That's another story. But meanwhile, the kernel of this one. The sales help, a brown-haired, soft spoken woman of a certain age, dressed in western inspired Napa-style, asked me what the name of my book was. When she heard it, she became delighted as well as indignant. "We need someone to stop this." I did not expect this reaction. Here I was thinking that all of Napa was in the Parker BIG WINE camp and wanted to hold public Alice Feiring book burnings. It turns out she and her husband farm on Stag's Leap, they farm cabernet. "They're killing us with the high sugars," she said. "They're killing the vines! They can't keep on producing grapes at that high level of sugar and survive." She went on to mourn that in order to meet what the winemakers want they have to stress their vines beyond what nature wants them to produce. I started to think of a grapevine that produces grapes at 26 brix and over as a post- menopausal woman carrying a baby.