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FIRST BIG FIRST BIG CRUSH, by Eric Arnold
Reviewed by Marisa D'Vari
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 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 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 wine making is real work, and dangerous
work 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 sympathy, 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 this scene colorful and descriptive
for the reader, for here is how he chronicles it:
"Essentially,"
he writes about the process of grabbing grapes, "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,
yet solid primer about the wine making process told from the vantage
point of a likeable, yet 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 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.
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First Big Crush Eric Arnold
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