Bookworm, no. 137
Christina Tommasone reviews Jill Troyer’s “The Winemaker’s Gamble.” Lindsey King on Zak Jones’s “Fancy Gap.” Inside the March issue.
In Pursuit of Grapeness
The Winemaker’s Gamble: How One Man and a Handful of Rebels Turned Niagara Wine into a Global Industry
Jill Troyer
Mosaic Press
224 pages, softcover
Picture an idyllic Niagara Peninsula landscape: quaint farmers’ markets, lush vineyards, regal châteaux. As the journalist Jill Troyer tells us in The Winemaker’s Gamble, we can thank a tenacious immigrant and his small group of “rebels” for the region’s award-winning Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs, and Rieslings.
The French-trained viticulturist Paul Bosc Sr. escaped the Algerian War and, in 1963, settled in Canada with his young family. At twenty-eight, he landed a job at Château-Gai, making the sort of lacklustre blended wines for which the area was known. But he dreamt of growing Vitis vinifera, “the most planted grapes in the world for wine.” In 1978, he opened Château des Charmes and began to devise unorthodox methods to keep the strain alive in Ontario’s frigid winters and inhospitable soil. He grafted 300,000 vines onto a strong North American rootstock to protect them from pests, and when a late frost loomed, he hired a helicopter to fly over his twenty-five hectares, to push warmer air to the ground. When that approach got too expensive, he spent $1 million on thirty-one fans. His efforts were ridiculed, but his crop made it to spring: “Everyone else was wiped out.” Some of the region’s largest producers, such as Henry of Pelham, ended up adopting his techniques.
Bosc, who died in December 2023, was the face of the industry—literally. In the 1970s, he starred in Château-Gai’s TV commercials. “That Italian looking guy with the French accent,” one executive announced when he saw the moustached natty dresser. “There can’t be a better way to sell wine than that!” He was right. In the first year of the campaign, the business sold nearly 10,000 percent more cases of Marechal Foch than anticipated.
—Christina Tommasone
He’ll Have What She’s Having
Fancy Gap
Zak Jones
Hamish Hamilton
336 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook
Zak Jones’s Fancy Gap follows an estranged family in rural Appalachia, where Christian nationalism, addiction, and unemployment run rampant. The debut novel’s most compelling thread belongs to the ornery preacher Nana Grace, who, in the haunting prologue, lets her grandson eat poisonous Easter lilies then justifies her deliberate carelessness: “We all got a little sin in us.”
Grace believes herself to be a prophet. A few years after the flower incident, she begins to terrorize local preachers whom she finds too weak in their faith. She abandons her family to start a “ministry” on her farmland, luring vulnerable people with the promise of “alms”—most often stolen opioids. Meanwhile, Jane, her daughter, deals with breast cancer. Jane’s eldest, Dalton, serves in the military, while her youngest, Messiah, struggles to belong at a Christian summer camp. Soon enough, Jane dies, Dalton is shamefully discharged, and Messiah lands in a neglectful foster home. When he stumbles, by chance, onto Grace’s property, he joins her cause.
Jones’s prose is strongest in scenes laced with biblical imagery, most memorably a pseudo-baptism where Messiah floats naked in a creek in his friend’s arms. A dual Canada-U.S. citizen and doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, Jones also relishes the sensory details of Grace’s compound. “Nightly fires in barrels and sporadic forest fires from lightning or cigarette ash pockmarked the cleared plains,” he writes. “People poured white lightning into watermelons.” Fancy Gap offers a chilling look at how ordinary people can find faith yet lose their way.
—Lindsey King
Inside the March Issue
“The author makes a careful case that the organized version of the sport is irreparably flawed, constructed in a way to favour a privileged, powerful few at the expense of the vast majority—including, by the way, most of its athletes.” Chris Jones on Rick Westhead’s We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada’s Troubled Hockey Culture.
J.R. Patterson reads Bradley Somer’s We Are All of Us Left Behind.
“Alas, in the second volume, the girls grow up and the novel becomes not a target but a poster book for Moms for Liberty.” Caroline Adderson finally gets around to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
And much more!