9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Work and Love, July 7, 2003
By A Customer
Here?s a book for a sparsely populated publishing niche: agricultural history as memoir. Hargrave?s declared subject is how she and her husband built a vineyard from scratch on the eastern end of Long Island but it?s also an engaging account of how she got from being an hopeful inexperienced young person of 21 to the mature woman who wrote this book.
There's nothing I don't like about The Vineyard.. I like Hargrave?s voice--direct,
unadorned, humorous, clear. I like the sense we get of how hard the work was. She doesn?t complain--much--but she does describe her daily life in enough detail that a reader has a vivid, physical sense of the vintner's life. Also, of how tough it is
to run a business according to one?s own lights. Her amateurishness--good
sense, not bad sense--at the outset gives way to know-how, but only as she
figured things out. And since the Hargrave wines can't be tasted as we turn the
pages, we have to take her word for the standards to which she and her husband aspired. And that?s just what we do; her writing is that persuasive. She doesn?t preen, never tries to show us her best profile, so we hear about her worries and annoyances, as well as about her joys.
The book is not all grapes and weather worries. Her children make frequent welcome appearances; her account of her marriage, its beginning, its long happy middle and its end, sounds pretty true-to-life. (If there were messy details, Hargrave doesn?t get into them. Hargrave?s ability to tell the hard truths and yet take the high road is one of her strengths as a writer.) Readers won't feel they know Alex as well as they know Louisa and their children but it?s a sastisfying read nonetheless. On balance, a well-rounded portrait of a couple of people and their business.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Grapes of wrath, April 9, 2004
My parents chose to own and run a small vineyard. As a contemporary of the author, it is easy for me to empathize with the problems of building a vineyard from scratch. That may best explain why I picked up this book.
The author and her husband are of a blue blood vintage. Family money allowed them to embark on this experiment, quite the dilettantes at the start. Hargrave and her tall husband had tried other ventures or career options, including an organ (and I don?t mean Wurlitzer) cookbook. My stomach is still turning at the thought. Nothing seemed to click. The two were peripatetic students, travelers, house sitters, Ivy leaguers, quasi trust fund babies, with colorful roots of their own. Louisa Thomas is the grand daughter of five-time Socialist candidate for president of the United States, Norman Thomas.
One thing they learned from their stab at cooking organs was that the wine allowed the unpalatable food to go down a whole lot better. Inspired in part by this finding, along with a desire to forego hard liquor, husband and wife made a go of starting a vineyard on Long Island. Only this time the process was very serious, engaging and almost enslaving. They mastered the delicate, detailed process of acquiring the right vines, grafting, plucking, fermenting, storing and marketing the wine. They produced great wine; they earned (or at least somehow garnered) great publicity. They hired a lot of people with diverse, difficult and demanding backgrounds. Husband and wife divided the tasks as best they could, each to his or her apparent comparative advantage, she the hands on technician, he the business officer. Along the way, unintentionally it seems, they transformed themselves from soul mates to business partners.
Raised on a ?grape farm? myself, where my family lived twenty years, her story is spot on ? the planting and pruning, dealing with fungus and pesticides, curbing the weeds, managing the harvest, living with weather that both killed and enhanced the crop ? and evoked long dormant memories and, in some cases, wounds. Grapes are much less romantic when they go into jelly, but also a whole lot easier, especially if you don?t make the final product yourself. The Hargraves immersed themselves in the task. They learned fast, worked hard, and seemed to prosper, even if at times it was by the skin of their grapes. My initial skepticism turned to admiration but, having lived some of their life, never envy.
The saddest part of an otherwise noble accomplishment is the fact that the husband and wife efforts apparently killed their marriage. It is not very clear why. As the sole author, the wife is a bit coy on this. It may have been fruitful to read the husband?s side of the full story, not just the demise of a good, working partnership. This is a very human, humane story.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining and Engaging Experience of a Modern Pioneer, July 22, 2003
By A Customer
A fascinating account of how a highly educated couple from a suburban background became successful "farming" pioneers growing grapes and making wine on Eastern Long Island. This was not sit-on-the veranda farming. The author makes reference to stories of the American frontier, and certainly that is apt, as the dedication and endurance of these pioneers was extraordinary. Their hard personal work in the fields was the equal of the pioneers, and they also had to deal with modern government. All in all, very intriguing and very well written, with enough human detail to make the people come to life.
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