The Vineyard : The Pleasures and Perils of Creating an American Family Winery [BARGAIN PRICE] (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When Louisa and Alex Hargrave bought an old potato farm in 1973 with plans to start a vineyard, they had "no farm experience and little life experience." What they did have was enthusiasm, optimism, a strong relationship, and just enough naivete to attempt what no one else had before managed: to create a viable winery on New York"s Long Island. Though experts said it was impossible, they successfully planted ten thousand vinifera vines and started a venture that lasted 30 years and inspired many others to start wineries in the area. The Vineyard is Louisa Hargrave's memoir of the endeavor and the price she paid to make her dreams come true.

True pioneers, the Hargraves learned their trade from scratch and raised their children close to the land. Louisa even strapped her babies to her back while working in the fields. Along the way, they encountered many predictable natural obstacles, including foul weather, pestilence, and disease, along with more than their fair share of man-made problems, such as meddlesome neighbors, vindictive bureaucrats, and money shortages. But their life was not all weeding and grafting; they also experienced the glamorous, and often absurd, world of professional wine making, complete with wealthy eccentrics and heavily politicized wine-tasting competitions.

Despite the success of the business, the experience took a heavy toll on her family, and she writes frankly about disappointments and marital problems without distracting from the main storyline. Her breezy tone and lively storytelling skills make the book an enjoyable read even for those with limited knowledge of wine-making. In short, the farm and life experience she gained over the past 30 years is worth passing on. --Shawn Carkonen --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In 1973, when Hargrave and her husband, Alex, decided to start a winery on Long Island, they were "college-educated suburbanites" with no previous experience in viticulture. Besides having to learn everything about the complicated and physically demanding process of growing grapes and making wine, they made life even more difficult for themselves by deciding to plant Vitis vinifera, the wine grape of Europe that was not supposed to grow on the East Coast of the U.S. In her candid, bittersweet memoir, Hargrave tells how they overcame hurricanes, destructive birds, diseased plants, problems with regulatory agencies, and jealous wine experts who wished them ill to achieve their goal of growing Vitis vinifera and producing award-winning wines. In 1999, she and Alex divorced, and since she couldn't afford to buy out her husband, the Hargrave Vineyard was sold. As she looks back on years of joy as well as hard work, Hargrave presents a colorful picture of life at the vineyard, describing planting and wine making, the manual labor-and how they raised their children. Her discussions of some of the historical and technical aspects of viticulture-the fermentation process; the way the type of wood used for wine barrels affects the taste of the wine-make for engaging reading. Hints of the coming breakup of her marriage embedded in her narrative are effective, but an overlong description of the couple's early years together and an account of the backpacking trip she made to Montana to do some soul-searching about the divorce detract from the main story and mar an otherwise appealing history of a pioneering vineyard.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• ISBN-10: 0670032212
• ASIN: B0002X7VXY
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,583,320 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Work and Love, July 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Vineyard: The Pleasures and Perils of Creating an American Family Winery (Hardcover)

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Grapes of wrath, April 9, 2004

By	Peter Lorenzi (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Vineyard: The Pleasures and Perils of Creating an American Family Winery (Hardcover)

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.

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

This review is from: The Vineyard: The Pleasures and Perils of Creating an American Family Winery (Hardcover)

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.