A Year in the Vineyard - Sophie Menin Pt. 1

Welcome. Welcome to the Best Five Minute Wine podcast with Forrest Kelly.

Hi, I'm Sophie Menin and I'm the co-author of A Year in the Vineyard, the Best Five Minute Wine Podcast.

Well, hello, Sophie. We welcome Sophie Menin co author of A Year in the Vineyard. A year in the Vineyard is a gorgeous new book. The book reveals how Wine growers are on the front line of the climate crisis, posing questions and potential remedies in response to the earth's changing ecology. Let's get some backstory to who Sophie is.

I'm a journalist. I've always been a writer and a journalist. I have a master's in cultural reporting and criticism from the Arthur Carter Institute at NYU. I've always. I started as, an art reporter, and then I moved into food, and then Wine became my subject. I'm very interested in the way it connects us to the earth and to culture and to ourselves and our senses. Now, you said your degree was in journalism and what, criticism.

Cultural reporting and criticism. Cultural reporting. And now the first half of that, I can understand that. The second part, that's not criticism,  The form of when your mom has. You do a chore and you don't do it right, and she lays down the hammer and tells you how to do it right. What is the criticism part?

Yeah, that's learning how to understand the subject deeply before you comment on it.

Wow. So in this form and day and age of entertainment slash news, where there's no double sourcing, you do that?

Actually, I do. I actually think I was the last of the journalism students told never to use the word I when you're writing. I mean, we really learned to engage with the material, read a lot before we start to formulate our own opinions and then make our opinions grounded in fact. And having read other sources, looking at.

Your bio, I see that your Wine writing focuses on the myriad ways that Wine connects us with our senses and the rhythms of the natural world. I like how that is put. And so that leads me to the question, is this your first Wine book?

This is my first book on wine, Well, congratulations. Thank you. So just as, a back history. On this, you started, say, January 1 of, whatever year, and then to get it to publish is how many years?

Well, it's a long story, actually, because I had the idea maybe more than a decade ago. And when I was writing for the daily, I had a column called 100 Summer Nights. And it was about summer meals and summer festivities. And one of the things I was doing was tracking the vine at a vineyard in France along with the column. And then I had the idea for this book, but I wanted it to be deeply visual, so I put it in a drawer for a while. And then a couple years later, I was on a press tour in the Walla Walla Valley, and I met Bob Chaplin, who is an environmental artist and a Wine writer and an artisanal bookmaker. And we started to collaborate, and we made a mock book. It was a very hard sell at the time because it doesn't tell you what to drink or anything like that. So it. But people kept falling in love with it, and it came in and out of drawers and out into the world. And then about two years ago, we met the people at culture shock in London, and they were starting an imprint, about the intersection of art, nature, and inspiration. And our book felt squarely in that unusual corner. And, so, after almost a decade of thinking about it, we wrote most of the book in a year.

If I'm getting this correctly, the book didn't come about because of your love for the taste of Wine but because of something deeper.

Well, I think it's thinking about what goes into the glasses of wines that I particularly love. So there's not a vineyard that's in this book whose wines I don't absolutely adore and hold in the highest esteem, but the book is about how Wine is made in the vineyard. And so it's really looking at the farming and the choices and the work that goes in to what goes into your glass.

My wife is a Wine drinker. I'm not a Wine drinker per se, but I love winemaking just because of the science that goes behind it. And I don't think there's anything I don't want to sound, you know like you were saying, you know, you can't. Put your opinion in something. But I don't think there are many things. In the world that has more passion. Behind them the winemakers that go into it. And it's not just what you're tasting, it's everything that goes in behind it. Right. There's a lot of dedication day in, and day out, no matter what the weather is, and a lot of thought. I mean, I find a lot of winemakers to be philosophers of sorts, right? Yeah. There's a lot of thinking behind it. The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast. Don't forget my favorite part. Please, please, like and follow,