First Big Crush: The Down and Dirty on Making Great Wine Down Under (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: fresh pork, blending day, young winemaker, New Zealand, First Big Crush, Sauvignon Blanc (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I've collected wine since the '70s, but I never thought about making it. Now that I've read this book, I really don't want to make it. I'll stick with drinking it."

-- Sammy Hagar, singer/songwriter and founder of Cabo Wabo Tequila

"How refreshing! The world according to Arnold shows it isn't all Grand Cru and roses. This is the hilarious, honest, knock-it-off-the-pedestal account of how it really happens. We come away better informed, trusting our own palate, and with our vinous compass pointed to fun!"

-- Richard Betts, master sommelier and cofounder of Betts & Scholl wines

"First Big Crush is a literary love child of Maxim and Wine Spectator: a raunchy, rollicking tale of a young guy's year in the vineyards of New Zealand, where his love of wine matures -- somewhat -- from the hunt for a cheap buzz to a genuine passion and appreciation."

-- Ted Allen, host/narrator of the PBS series Uncorked: Wine Made Simple, food and wine specialist for Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and author of The Food You Want to Eat

"First Big Crush is unlike any wine book I've ever read, a hugely entertaining hybrid of the participatory journalism of George Plimpton, the hallucinatory journalism of Hunter Thompson, and frat house bathroom graffiti. He's a bull in the china shop of wine writing and it's a pleasure to see him breaking everything in sight."

-- Jay McInerney, author of The Good Life

Product Description

The story behind the bottle, First Big Crush is Eric Arnold's wild account of his year immersing himself in all things wine...and somehow not winding up in rehab.

Never having held a meaningful job for very long (and getting fired from most of them), Eric Arnold heads to New Zealand -- to Allan Scott Wines -- seeking adventure and hoping to learn a little bit about wine. What could be better than working outside in the fresh air and drinking wine all day? Before he knows it, he is dirty, wet, cold, and at the mercy of a tank of wine that just might explode and take him with it. So begin Eric's adventures in the world of wine. He gets sunburned, sore, and drunk -- and then does it all over again the next day.

First Big Crush is a story that is as outrageous as it is compelling. Here are tales of first pressings, pruning, and tasting competitions. There are also rowdy nights at the local pub, girls, meat pies, girls, rugby, and tales of hunting wild pig. Along the way, each step of the winemaking process is explained in a way that humans can actually understand. Almost against his will, Eric becomes an expert.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (September 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416537694
• ISBN-13: 978-1416537694
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #556,900 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #37 in

  Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Regional & International > Asian > Pacific Rim

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Of Grapes and Men, November 5, 2007

By	Barbara Hudgins "author of "Crafting the... (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Lately there have been a number of travel memoirs in the "how I took a year off and did something crazy in a foreign country" mode. Usually these travels have been inspired by a great emotional upheaval in the writer. Consider the current bestseller, "Eat, Pray, Love" in which the author goes off to Italy, India and Indonesia to recover from a love affair and reinvent her life. Or the past bestseller, "Under the Tuscan Sun" which also had a writer take off to find a new life after tumult in the old one.

However, there was no such sturm and drang in the life of 29-year-old Eric Arnold. He set off for a year to New Zealand to become immersed in grapes and the wine-making process for no better reason than he thought it was a good idea. After a few years of working at various hack writing jobs he decided to chuck it all for an up-close look at the burgeoning wine industry Down Under.
What we get is a short description of the farming community of Marlborough situated in the southern island of New Zealand, and a ton of details on the growing, pruning, and picking of grapes and then squeezing and squishing them through modern steel tanks.
During the year, Eric joins in the everyday work of the winery (which includes some close encounters with errant steel hoses and tank closures) and the more rarified tasks of tastings and competitions. This is winemaking 101 with a few side pictures of New Zealanders at work and play. While the men work 12-hour days during the season, play consists of mostly drinking, fighting, finding girls and losing their teeth at the occasional Rugby match.
The snobbism of wine sophisticates seems at a variance with the down-to-earth reality of grape-growing and wine mixing. Arnold points out that this is a farm isolated in the middle of a country where sheep outnumber people by a wide margin. He also throws in some off-color jokes to let us know this is testosterone country. Although he portrays himself as a slacker, he comes through all the wet, harried days to become a more mature man. Or at least a more mature drinker who can now judge wine with the best of them rather than just quaffing down the stuff to get a buzz. Since he now has a job at Wine Spectator he must have learned something. And he does his utmost in 245 pages to teach us what that is.
Barbara Hudgins, author of "Crafting the Travel Guidebook"

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read the "dirty" in more than one sense, April 6, 2008

By	Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Eric Arnold spent a year in New Zealand's Marlborough winemaking region. Years earlier he spent a day touring the area: "And from my very first sip of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc at ten-thirty or so on that morning, I knew it, too -- I was tasting something special. My mouth zipped and zinged, and though I couldn't describe the flavors I was tasting, I was sure of only one thing: I wanted more. I was hammered by noon, with five wineries still to go. At one point I stole the tour guide's microphone in the van and started singing karaoke -- "The Tracks of My Tears" by Smokey Robinson -- even though I didn't know the words. I might've taken off my shirt, too, but I don't remember. From winery to winery and sip to sip, the wines just got better and better. From the time I got back home to Brooklyn, whenever I was in a wine shop I either bought wine from New Zealand or asked for something similar. Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc was my new Hogue."

The memory of that firts Sauvignon Blanc sticks in Arnold's memory:

"For a few years after that trip I was still guzzling whatever New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc I could find at night, and spending my daylight hours working the copy desk at a small business magazine. It was better than working for the Nazi devil woman at PBS, but the same could probably be said for cleaning up monkey shit at the zoo (which, I imagine, is very similar to working at PBS). So out of a desire to drink more, work less, and maybe satisfy a little curiosity, up sprang the idea of just throwing myself into the lifestyle: getting a job at a winery and writing a book about it."

Arnold initially knows nothing about winery work, but you have to admire his cheerful attitude, no matter what reality throws at him. He learns about rugby, pig hunting, and hard working rural New Zealanders. He finds two particularly difficult areas: the finer points of pitchforking and pruning winter vines in the cold fields. He concludes:

"Vineyard work sucks...I have no idea why, but many people who drink wine think that making it is some sort of relaxed, cushy lifestyle. And I don't understand it , because I've never eaten a juicy steak and imagined how romantic and luxurious a life I'd have if I started raising cattle in Wyoming. Similarly, I've never met anyone who got a massage and moved to Sweden or shot heroin and moved to Afghanistan."

Arnold is excellent at describing the difficulties and joys of working in a vineyard and in a winery. His language may be a bit racy for some readers, his humor a little too broad. Overall, I found the substance worth a few "Oh, grow up" moments.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read, from Marisa D'Vari of AWineStory.com, September 6, 2007

By	Marisa D'vari (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

So you've seen the film Sideways and know how geeky wine aficionados can get about their favorite grape. Hey, you've been there too after a few glasses of Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon. Once upon a time you felt pretty slick about your wine savvy, but now you're curious to learn more. How is wine made, anyway? What happens during the harvest? Are grapes stomped, Lucille Ball style, by humans standing in a large wooden cask, or is it a mechanical process?

Duly motivated, you zip off to the store and find dozens of books detailing how wine is made. Yet after skimming the dry, dense, detailed paragraphs that remind you of your high school chemistry textbook, your eyes glaze over.

Enter Eric Arnold, whose new book, First Big Crush, is a colorful, laugh-out-loud funny account of his tenure during a New Zealand grape harvest, filled with wacky real-life characters. Of course, I should have figured as much. The first time I saw Arnold, on a WineSpectator.com video clip, he was cleaning the interior of a wine tank, gangly jean-covered legs waving in the air. This guy, I thought, is up for anything.

What first brings Arnold, then an unemployed editor, to Alan Scott Wines in New Zealand is the prospect of getting paid to lazily drink wine in the sun. Very quickly, Arnold discovers winemaking is real work, and dangerous at that. One day, he shows up for his assigned task without boots, expecting to simply push a button. To his surprise, he's expected to kick a half-ton container of grapes, and nearly loses a toe. Instead of sympathizing, Arnold's New Zealand colleagues taunt him, asking why he's walking like a girl.

Arnold's first-person voice is candid and bold, his literary style so lively you won't feel you're reading text as much as you are experiencing the harvest at Arnold's side. In one scene, he is told to walk through the rows of grape vines with a bucket and randomly grab fistfuls of grapes. What activity could possibly be more repetitive and boring? Arnold must have thought long and hard about how to make the process of grabbing grapes colorful and descriptive for the reader, for here is how he chronicles it: "Essentially, you're simulating the world of a machine harvester, which doesn't discriminate, ripping everything off like it just got out of prison and the vine is the dress on a twenty-dollar whore."

In the course of these hilarious 245 pages, you also learn a great deal about Arnold and his twenty-something, slightly slacker-esque, and very male way of viewing the world. For instance, when discussing his relationship with a French girlfriend, he writes, "I'm afraid this isn't the part where I tell you that she took me back to France and taught me everything there is to know about Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne. She had so little interest in food and wine - plus she didn't smoke and she shaved her armpits - that they must have kicked her out of France for not being French enough."

First Big Crush is a highly entertaining but solid primer about the wine making process, told from the vantage point of a likable and very direct narrator. If you've ever wondered how wines are judged in competition, or what factors influence the pricing of wine, you'll see the process through Arnold's eyes. And if you ever fantasized about what it is like to work the harvest but didn't want to get wet and dirty, you can get the vicarious experience right here.

Building Buzz: How To Reach And Impress Your Target Audience