Welcome to Shooting by Numbers!
by Danny Wood, a former BBC News correspondent with 15 years of journalism experience.
Here’s a video interview with Todd Kilman about his book The Wild Vine and its “untold story of American wine”. Todd wanted to be incognito, so that’s why there’s a little too much of me early in the interview. Also, I didn’t follow-up the first question and clarify what exactly Todd was doing and how he got hooked on the Norton grape. Todd got hooked on the Norton when he was drinking wine with friends during the fifth consecutive night of a blackout in Washington DC. Here’s how he tells what happened in The Wild Vine:
“Whether it was the lateness of the hour, the subtle power of the wine, the sense of being at the mercy of the elements, my drunkenness, or all of these things working on me at once, I can’t say, but it was as if what I was drinking was an embodiment of the moment, the mystery, a correlative to our primal condition. It was dark, it was earthy; there was something wild, something alive, in the glass.
I had seldom tasted this earthiness in California wines. I did taste it in European wines…but the Norton was bigger than most of those wines…
The conversation had moved on by this time, to talk of other meals, of movies, of how long we could live without our modern comforts, but I hadn’t moved on. I was still thinking about the Norton.” (page 8, The Wild Vine, Todd Kliman)
An appropriate teaser for the full interview. Here it is:
