Joanne Harris's first novel, Chocolat, was set in the sleepy French village of Lansquenet, where enchantment, romance, and soft-centered truths issued from the local confectioner's shop. She returns to the same location for Blackberry Wine. But as the title suggests, she's shifted her focus from food to drink, choosing a half-dozen bottles of homemade plonk as the catalyst for her "layman's alchemy." And even the narrator is no human being but a faintly tannic Fleurie 1962: "A pert, garrulous wine, cheery and little brash, with a pungent taste of blackcurrant!" There are, of course, some less vinous characters in the novel. Harris's protagonist, Jay Mackintosh, is a former literary star, now sadly stalled. He spends his time writing second-rate science fiction, leading a hollow media life, and drinking: "Not to forget, but to remember, to open up the past and find himself there again." Yet the nice, expensive wines don't do the trick. Instead, six "Specials"--a gift from his old friend Joe--function as Jay's magical elixir. Like Proust's lime-blossom tisane, they give him the gift of his memories but also unlock his future, which encourages him to flee the rut of his London life and buy a house in Lansquenet.
As Jay settles in, he contemplates his childhood friendship with Joe, whose idiosyncratic outlook was the inspiration for his only successful book. Meanwhile, he becomes involved in village life, encountering some familiar faces from Chocolat. Caro and Toinette, the snooty troublemakers, soon put in an appearance, and Josephine, the bar owner and battered wife of the earlier novel, becomes a real friend. But it's a new character, the enigmatic Marise, who becomes the focus of Jay's attention--and who helps to restore his literary joie de vivre. This feat of resurrection makes for a hugely enjoyable read. It also goes one step further in adding Lansquenet to the map of imaginary destinations, where daydreams can come true with intoxicating frequency. --Eithne Farry
The new novel by the author of the delectable Chocolat [BKL S 15 99] lacks its voluptuous perfection but entrances nonetheless. We're back in the tiny French town of Lansquenet, where some of the major players in Chocolat now have supporting roles. On a whim, struggling writer Jay Macintosh has bought an old farmhouse near Lansquenet that reminds him of the summers he spent as a teenager with Joe, a combination of faerie godfather, Jerry Garcia, and Johnny Appleseed. In Joe's tender regard for growing things, his wondrous stories, and the magic he places in bottles of strange fruit wine, the teen Jay finds both solace and fury. It's those wine bottles that whisper to Jay and send him to the French cottage; he is even more amazed when Joe, absent for decades, appears and disappears abruptly, slightly transparent but still somehow present. Chocolat lovers will be pleased, and new readers satisfied. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews
Harris (Chocolat, 1999) returns with a charming fairy tale for grown-ups, including all those seductive elements of contemporary fantasies: a house in the French countryside, potions and healers with the power to transform, love that is always tender, if seldom convincing.Now in his 30s, Jay Mackintosh has failed to produce a successor to the acclaimed novel celebrating English village life that he wrote ten years ago. Jay puts bread on the table with science-fiction thrillers cranked out under a pseudonym, but otherwise he has a serious case of writer's block. Then one night Jay opens one of old Joe Cox's fruit wines and starts recalling the summers he spent working with Joe in his garden on Pog Hill in the former mining town of Kirby Monckton. Jay's lonely adolescent summers (his wealthy parents had separated) were transformed by meeting retired coal miner Joe, and these memories alternate with the sudden changes in his present life in London. The day after drinking the bottle of wine, Jay receives a brochure in the mail advertising a château for sale in the heart of the Dordogne. He thinks it's a sign from long-lost Joe, a healer, potion-maker, and fabulist who always talked of one day owning a château in France. Energized, Jay buys the château, leaves London and girlfriend Kerry, and becomes the lord of a crumbling but promising French estate. There, he meets a colorful range of rural characters who soon make him feel welcome, but he's most intrigued by his neighbor, the beautiful but elusive young widow Marise, and her supposedly deaf daughter, Rosa. As Jay begins writing a new novel, clearing the property, and planting as his mentor had taught him, a disembodied Joe appears to counsel and criticize. Jay learns why the villagers shun Marise and, in a story that can only end well, finds the happiness he lost when Joe disappeared from Pog Hill 20 years ago.Sweet and lite. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
A charming fairy tale for grown-ups. -- Kirkus Reviews
An entertaining narrative, equal parts whimsy and drama. -- Publisher's Weekly
From the Inside Flap
From the author of Chocolat, an intoxicating fairy tale of alchemy and love where wine is the magic elixir.
Jay Mackintosh is a 37-year-old has-been writer from London. Fourteen years have passed since his first novel, Jackapple Joe, won the Prix Goncourt. His only happiness comes from dreaming about the golden summers of his boyhood that he spent in the company of an eccentric vintner who was the inspiration of Jay's debut novel, but who one day mysteriously vanished. Under the strange effects of a bottle of Joe's '75 Special, Jay decides to purchase a derelict yet promising château in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. There, a ghost from his past waits to confront him, and his new neighbour, the reclusive Marise - haunted, lovely and dangerous - hides a terrible secret behind her closed shutters. Between them, there seems to be a mysterious chemistry. Or could it be magic?
Joanne Harris's previous novel, Chocolat, was both a dazzling literary success and a commercial triumph. Chocolat, the major motion picture directed by Lasse Hallström (The Cider House Rules), was released in December 2000, starring Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp, Dame Judy Dench, Alfred Molina, and Lena Olin.
From the Back Cover
"Joanne Harris has the gift of conveying her delight in the sensuous pleasure of food, wine, scent and plants—Blackberry Wine has all the appeal of a velvety scented glass of vintage wine."—Daily Mail
About the Author
Joanne Harris is the author of seven previous novels—Chocolat, Blackberry Wine, Five Quarters of the Orange, Coastliners, Holy Fools, Sleep, Pale Sister, and Gentlemen & Players; a short story collection, Jigs & Reels; and two cookbook/memoirs, My French Kitchen and The French Market. Half French and half British, she lives in England.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Wine talks; ask anyone. The oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue, teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even knew. It shouts, rants, whispers. It speaks of great plans, tragic loves and terrible betrayals. It screams with laughter. It chuckles softly to itself. It weeps in front of its own reflection. It revives summers long past and memories best forgotten. Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places, every one -- from the commonest Liebfraumilch to the imperious Veuve Clicquot -- a humble miracle. Everyday magic, Joe had called it. The transformation of base matter into the stuff of dreams. Layman's alchemy.
Take these six in Jay's cellar, for instance. The Specials. Not wines really meant for keeping, but he kept them all the same. For nostalgia's sake. For a special, yet-to-be-imagined occasion. Six bottles, each with its own small handwritten label and sealed with candle wax. Each had a cord of a different color knotted around its neck, raspberry red, elderflower green, blackberry blue, rose hip yellow, damson black. The last bottle was tied with a brown cord. Specials '75, said the label, the familiar writing faded to the color of old tea.
But inside was a hive of secrets. There was no escaping them: their whisperings, their catcalls, their laughter. Jay had hidden them behind a crate of more sober vintages the day he'd brought them back from Pog Hill Lane. Five weeks later he could almost persuade himself they were forgotten. Even so he sometimes imagined he heard them, without really knowing what it was he heard.
Jay Mackintosh was thirty-seven. Unremarkable but for his eyes, which were Pinot Noir indigo, he had the awkward, slightly dazed look of a man who has lost his way. Five years ago Kerry had found this appealing. By now she had lost her taste for it. There was something deeply annoying about his passivity and the core of stubbornness beneath. She knew there were depths to Jay, but for some reason he remained sealed off to her, neatly deflecting any attempt at intimacy. Her only point of entry to that secret place was through his books. Through his book.
Fourteen years ago Jay had written a novel called Jackapple Joe. It won the Prix Goncourt in France, translated into twenty languages. Three crates of vintage Veuve Clicquot celebrated its publication -- the '76, drunk too young to do it justice. Jay was like that then, rushing at life as if it might never run dry, as if what was bottled inside him would last forever in a celebration without end.
But then something happened. Perhaps it was the unexpected success of Jackapple Joe which paralyzed him. Perhaps the weight of expectation, of affection from a public hungry for more. Television interviews, newspaper articles, reviews succeeded each other into silence. Hollywood made a film adaptation with Corey Feldman, set in the American Midwest. Nine years passed. Jay wrote part of a manuscript entitled Stout Cortez and sold eight short stories to Playboy magazine, which were later reprinted as a collection by Penguin Books. The literary world waited for Jay Mackintosh's new novel, eagerly at first, then restless, curious, then finally, fatally, indifferent.
Of course he still wrote. There had been seven novels to date, with titles like The G-sus Gene and Psy-Wrens of Mars and A Date with d'Eath, all written under the pseudonym of Jonathan Winesap, nice earners which kept him in reasonable comfort. Every month the post brought him a sizable packet of fan mail, all addressed to Jonathan Winesap, mostly from America. Sometimes the letters contained blurry photographs of UFOs or accounts of out-of-body experiences or magical amulets or newspaper clippings dealing with unexplained phenomena. These he explored, debunked and filed away in the neat drawers of a large cabinet next to his desk. He was a great advocate of keeping fiction in its place. Sometimes he attended fantasy conventions and made impassioned speeches about what he called the Conspiracy of the Unexplained, in which he argued that the public's appetite for strange phenomena was being deliberately nurtured by the media to divert attention from a world crisis spinning ever more wildly out of control. He bought a Toshiba laptop which he balanced on his knees like the TV dinners he made for himself on the nights -- increasingly frequent now -- Kerry worked late. Occasionally he lectured at writers' groups, held creative-writing seminars at the university. More often he wasted hours surfing the Internet and drinking too much.
Kerry watched him with growing disapproval. Kerry O'Neill (born Katherine Marsden), twenty-five, cropped red hair and startling green eyes, a journalist made good into television by way of Forum!, a late-night talk show where popular authors and B-list celebrities discussed contemporary social problems against a background of avant-garde jazz. Five years ago she might have been more tolerant. But then, five years ago there was no Forum!, Kerry was writing a women's column for the Independent and she was working on a lighthearted book entitled Chocolate -- A Feminist Outlook. The world was filled with possibilities.
Her book came out two years later on a wave of media interest. Kerry was photogenic, marketable and mainstream. As a result she appeared on a number of lightweight talk shows. She was photographed for Marie Claire, Tatler and Me! but was quick to reassure herself that it hadn't gone to her head. She had a house in Chelsea, a pied-á-terre in New York and was considering liposuction on her thighs. If she sometimes wondered what had happened to the impetuous girl who had read Jackapple Joe and fallen wildly in love with the author, she seldom spoke of it. She had grown up. Moved on...
