I’d just filled a wine bottle with Malbec and was handing it to a neighbor who was operating the manual corking machine when it occurred to me that wine making is a lot like book writing.
I was at the tail end of a whirlwind tour to promote my new book, and I was home just long enough to help out with some bottling at the little winery my husband has built from the ground up, with sweat, love and borrowed or bartered equipment.
A good wine starts with good grapes, just as a good book begins with a good idea. But neither of these is enough to produce a delicious wine or unforgettable book. These things take patience, time and the right kind of effort.
Wine begins with delectable grapes that are then crushed, pressed and fermented. (The order of the pressing and fermenting depends on whether you’re making a white or red wine.) Then the waiting begins. Nature needs to take its course. The Malbec we were bottling today was harvested in 2016, and it spent 30 months in French oak before reaching the bottle.
That’s a lot how it went with my book, too. I began with the idea, then mushed it around, researching it from every angle while allowing the ideas I was accumulating to ferment into something enticing. There was a lot of waiting around for ideas to mature.
When the wine’s initial fermentation is done, it needs time to stabilize and, if it’s in barrels, to reduce and intensify its flavors. This finishing time is a little bit like the editorial process where a book is revised and edited into its final form.
Finally, when the wine is ready to drink, we gather together a crew from our winery’s community of supporters to form the assembly line and move the wine from barrel to bottle. It’s a lot like the publishing process — it takes a team to get the job done.
Cheers!
