Naked Wine will be published on Sept 1st. So in the next weeks, I'll be publishing the first grafs of each chapter. The prologue is printed in whole. I'm hoping you'll love it enough to buy it. Well, one can always hope. I'm trying to be an optimist in the next chapter of my own life.
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Fate or Folly
Levin finished his glass and they were silent for
a while. --Leo Tolstoy
During the summer of 2008 in the midst of a book tour, I found myself driving around California in a rental car. One of my last stops was in the Sonoma town of Healdsburg. So far, the readings and interviews had been fun, but as Healdsburg is packed with wine industry folk, I sensed that I was in for something different. I had been warned that as a mostly French- wine-drinking New Yorker, I would have to defend my recent ed- itorial for the Los Angeles Times, which my editor had titled California Wine? Down the Drain, especially to a hall full of wine professionals. “Today’s wines are overblown, over-oaked, over- priced and over-manipulated” were some of my stated, perhaps radical and unpopular, thoughts on the state’s wine, which I firmly believed
had lost its identity since the early '90s. Expecting the worst, I mused that instead of a thin summer frock, I should have worn a flak jacket.
After a scorcher of a day, the cool air had started to blow in re- lief from the ocean, twenty miles away, and I began getting a little buzzed about standing up in front of an audience. As someone who spends most of her days in an introverted state, fixated on a computer screen, I do enjoy the adrenalin that can kick in when I give a reading or a talk. That surge often makes me feel smarter and faster than I ordinarily think of myself. So, feeling in top form, I strolled into the library and waited on the sidelines of the stark auditorium to be introduced.As I watched a mostly grim-faced crowd walk in, I nervously pressed my book into my lap.
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