Good Books – The Mad Crush

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Which brings us to The Mad Crushby Sean Christopher Weir – a moving account of wine-making and a special harvest season that took place almost twenty years ago in the wildlands of California’s Central Coast.

The best memoirs have an almost lyrical sense of history, time and place, and Weir brings those elements together beautifully. But it’s the book’s profound sense of place, an almost spiritual love of that land, which lingered longest for me – and made this simple remembrance, of a time and a wine, so evocative.

The Mad Crush is alive with the spirit of a secret California – a central coastal region of rolling hills and lost canyons, just in from the Pacific. Situated in the upper Arroyo Valley, San Luis Obispo County is a dry chaparral region, home to loners and drifters, artists and drug dealers – and a visionary wine-maker, as well.

That’s where the author found himself in the waning summer days of 1995 – birthing wine in Saucelito Canyon with a Yoda-like recluse and his rag tag California crew.

Weir’s memoir is about the romance of making wine. And about how that process, as he explains, “of physically willing mere grapes to become something infinitely more beautiful and more lasting,” can also season the man.

You see, grapes left on the vine, like an undirected life, will just rot – but turned into wine they tell a story. And The Mad Crush is the intoxicating story of a 1995 Saucelito Ranch Zinfandel and the people who made it.

Weir’s tale spans a century, starting with an itinerant Englishman who first planted the Zinfandel and Muscat vines in Saucelito Canyon back in the 1880s, only to see his dreams soon die and his vineyard along with it. Nearly a hundred years later, Bill Greenough, a central Californian bohemian and solitary dreamer, rediscovered the forgotten vineyard and nursed it back to health – to become the acclaimed winery that it is today.

The Mad Crush captures one special harvest – a season of worry and toil- and follows the author’s exploits, as he and his improbable crew shepherd the precious grapes from field to barrel.  Long days and weeks of labor – it’s a journey that’s always just one step away from disaster.  It’s also a personal journey for Weir, one told with gentle wit and sometimes disarming truthfulness.

At its core, The Mad Crush is one man’s almost mythic celebration of wine-making and self-discovery – and a harvest season long past. But it’s also an ode to a California, its people and a way of life that many think gone.

Quietly prosaic and genuinely entertaining, The Mad Crush reads like a fine Zinfandel – an experience to be savored.