The Coterie is a tall, white, windowless building standing sentinel on a knoll a short distance outside Blenheim in the Marlborough region of New Zealand. In it is housed a collective of young vintners experimenting with vinification methods, a quiet revolution, in rebellion against all things Kim Crawford and the monoculture of Sauvignon Blanc, a lesser grape variety Kiwis had grown dangerously dependent on. Hana had thought, given my first novel had explored a region of wine in California, this would be a marriage of my new book and a wine tasting with young, hip winemakers who all held me in esteem.
We parked the camper van adjacent to the Coterie structure on a patch of dirt. Close by, Jack was helping Amanda unpack and assemble the Marlin Cruiser into a tent habitat. On a first go-round, the setup appeared complicated, and bickering competed with the birdsong and the stunning vineyard vistas as they set about pounding stakes into the ground with mallets and unfolding canvas coverings in an abode I had trouble imagining them having sex in.
In the camper van, I fed a purring, neglected Max, then convened with Hana in the back.
Hana interlaced her fingers and sighed. “I don’t think Jack’s partner is a good idea for tonight,” she said.
“We might have no choice.” I lifted Max onto my lap and petted him until his purring grew audible.
“Then I’m going to let you handle it because I see a conflict.”
“What, Hana?”
“Miles. These young winemakers see you as a rock star in the wine world. One word out of that woman’s mouth and it’s going to look bad for you.” She reached in her bag for her half-smoked joint, then decided against firing it up. “I don’t have a good feeling about this.” Worry drew nests of wrinkles in the corners of her youthful eyes.
“I’ll talk to them over dinner,” I consoled her.
Hana glanced at her watch. “Be back here at eight,” she said.
“You don’t want to have dinner with us?”
Hana straightened to her feet in the camper van and smiled sarcastically. She opened the door.
“Watch out for the step,” I said, but Hana had already gone tumbling out.
“Fuckingstepladdershit,” she cursed, clutching a knee with one hand and employing the other to clamber back to her feet.
“You okay, Hana?” I called out, braced against the open door.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” she said, brushing herself off. “I’m so fucking okay it’s unreal!”
Max, hearing the commotion and seizing a rare opportunity, made a dash to scramble out the open door, but I managed to stop him by scissoring my legs closed, then picked him up by the scruff of the neck and reproved him by bouncing an index finger against his nose. “No, little guy, I can’t lose you. Don’t run out on me.”
When the Marlin Cruiser tent had finally been erected and Hana had departed for the nearest public shower, Amanda drove Jack and me in her Ridgeback into the nearby town of Blenheim.
“You should move to Byron Bay,” Amanda said to me with a backward look as Jack followed Google Maps to a Brazilian restaurant named Gramado’s that Amanda had picked out based on a recommendation from one of her many Kiwi friends.
“I prefer it in New Zealand,” I said from the back, querulous, itching for a drink.
“Miles might have to go to California after the book tour,” said Jack, “in which case he wouldn’t be able to return.”
Amanda threw her head around to the back where I was seated to meet my eyes. “All the more reason to move to Australia. I know someone who would sponsor you in a heartbeat.” She turned back to the windshield flooded with a full moon sweeping in and out of gathering rain clouds, haloing their penumbras. “You two would have a lot in common,” Amanda said.
“What does she do?” I inquired faux-naively, knowing she was probably referencing the writer friend Jack had apprised me of.
“She’s a novelist like you,” she said without elaborating.
“Writers don’t get along,” I said, to be difficult because I was having difficulty warming up to her—I can’t stand brash, fulsome, gushy actress types; they make my skin crawl; I don’t trust them. “They’re temperamentally—”
“Miles,” Jack chopped me off.
“You’d like Jamie,” Amanda said.
“How do you know her?”
“I produced the limited series of her A Sorrow Beyond Years.”
“Okay, I’m officially impressed,” I said, recognizing the title of the award-winning miniseries. “But I might need to return to the States.”
Intrigued, Amanda threw me a backward look, but this time she telescoped it over the headrest, and I could smell her wine-scented breath. She and Jack had already started uncorking bottles in the cache of Prophet’s Rock Pinot I had stocked up on before departing on this warped book tour. “Why?”
“It’s personal.”
“A woman?”
“It’s personal. Only Max knows.”
“Who’s Max?”
“His cat,” Jack explained.
Amanda cackled so loud and unendingly it turned me against her, even though, for Jack’s sake, I wanted to like her. Jack locked his eyes on mine, brought an index finger to his lips to let me know he wouldn’t tell her a thing I had divulged to him. I wagged an index finger at him in dire admonition he’d better not.
Gramado’s is a small, family-style Brazilian restaurant in the heart of Blenheim. The waitstaff are overly solicitous. They pull up a chair to your table midmeal and try to engage the dinner party in a conversation about, for example, the spiciness of peppers. It’s a rehearsed performance, it would never happen in the States, but this is New Zealand, and a lot of the people on the South Island are uptight Scots, and maybe the foodie interaction gives them a sense of feeling wanted—all that time alone with the sheep, you know.
After the young man had been shooed off by an impatient Amanda, she peered at me over her menu. “Miles, how can I help you on this book tour? You realize the young Māori girl doesn’t know what the fuck she’s doing, right?” I ignored the subtle racism in her undertone.
“It’s her gig,” I defended Hana. “Plus, I like her. A lot.”
“Jack said you’ve hosted some pretty strange events. I mean, you’re Miles Raymond, author of one of the most famous wine novels in literary history,” she hyperbolized, “and you’re on a beach as the guest of honor of a book club called the Long Drop?” She barked a laugh. “You should be in front of hundreds. Autographing books until your writing hand cramps.”
“I appreciate the compliments, Amanda, but I’m loath to let Hana go.”
“She’s never done this before!”
“How do you know?”
“Because”—she held up her phone—“I googled her. There’re no other authors on her résumé.”
“I like her creative spirit,” I said in further defense of the inexperienced Hana and because I had a soft spot in my heart for a publicist who camped in her own car in order to make the stingy budget Hughie had her on.
“The Cougars of Christchurch Book Club?” Amanda scoffed.
“That was foisted on her, but it turned out . . . interesting.”
“Sounds disgusting.” She leaned her head forward again in a threatening gesture. “What really happened there?” She swiveled suspicious looks between me and Jack for any catcher-and-pitcher signs. Jack’s face went stoic and I stared fixedly at my menu. “Huh?”
“I sold a dozen books and got a handsome appearance fee,” I lied.
Amanda drilled her dagger producer eyes into me.
“You produced the limited series of your friend’s A Sorrow Beyond Years?” I said to get her off the Cougars disaster.
“IMDb it if you don’t believe me.”
“I truly loved that book.”
“I’ll let Jamie know.”
“I’d love to meet her,” I said, biting my tongue, thinking of Ella, and that thought competing with wanting to mollify inquisitional Amanda.
The performative waiter returned to take our orders, fake Brazilian accent on full display. Taking charge, Amanda selected a bottle of local Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.
“Kim Crawford? Are you fucking kidding me?” I protested.
“I like it.”
“It’s industrial waste. Here, give me the wine list,” I said, extending my hand. Amanda relinquished it, miffed I had rejected her decision by vilifying her taste. “We’ll have a bottle of the Boneline Iridium,” I said, then handed him the wine list back.
Chameleonic Amanda, not one to linger on a slight, shifted into a more ebullient disposition, produced a shopping bag, and hauled out two sweaters. One was brown embroidered with three white sheep with a black sheep in the middle. The other was blue with four white sheep handwoven into it. “Bonz Black Sheep jumpers,” she said. She made a presentment of them for examination.
I reached out and felt one. “Soft,” I said.
“They’re handwoven out of llama wool. But the cool thing is the sheep are all woven out of a different yarn from a different animal. And they’re not cheap. You should wear them. It’ll be your uniforms. Social media will catch on to this—”
“—And I’ll be the laughingstock of the literary world.”
“It’s quintessentially New Zealand, Miles. Kiwis will love you.”
“I’ll run it by Hana. But thank you, Amanda.”
“Come on, be good sports, try them on.”
I shook my head, but Jack made a face as if saying, Come on, humor her, remember where our bread is buttered here.
Jack and I clumsily pulled on the sheep sweaters. They were cashmere soft and warm . . . and kitschy as all hell.
Amanda reared back and clapped approval. “I think you two look cute.”
Jack nodded at me. I nodded back at him. We kept them on to appease Amanda in hopes she wouldn’t continue her inquiry into the Cougars of Christchurch fiasco.
Over dessert, Amanda got down to business. “I think this book tour needs to go bigger, Miles.”
“Jack hinted you had something up your producer sleeve.”
“I’m putting together a shorthand crew to come down and film it.”
“He told me.”
“And you’re not using social media with enough posts. Your Hana posts a photo now and then. I’m talking about professionally produced videos.”
Jack shot me a moronic smile as if: See, Amanda’s going to right the ship and you’re going to learn to love her.
“Let me think about it,” I said. It was obvious what was happening. The producer in her was taking over, as producers are wont to do. She had grand designs for my modest, if off-to-a-rocky-start, book tour. But like all of her grand plans, there was an ulterior motive. And it was Jack. She wanted him to return to Byron Bay.
We drove back to the Coterie, Amanda talking a mile a minute about her documentary ideas, my meeting her famous writer friend Jamie, fantasizing two happily married couples down under in Byron Bay.
Back at the Coterie, Hana laughed out loud when she saw Jack and me, standing next to each other, wearing our black-sheep sweaters. “You’re not going to wear those, are you?” she howled in execration, astonished, appalled, one hand clasped to her mouth to stifle her laughter.
“We are,” Jack said.
“Who bought those hideous jumpers?”
“I did,” snorted Amanda, eavesdropping a few feet away, her face lit up by her pesky phone.
Hana steered an expression of rebuke to her but, not sure about the dynamic, didn’t say anything in response. Finally: “Okay. Whatever you guys want to do. Let’s go inside.”
The Coterie is a high-ceilinged barrel room, a custom crush facility festooned with winemaking equipment from barrels to stainless steel vats to cement eggs to basket presses and other winemaking equipment. Composed of a dozen young winemakers experimenting with grapes grown in Marlborough, they were undoubtedly the most avant-garde thing happening in the New Zealand wine world. Their respect for my first novel and the movie adapted from it was evident in their starstruck eyes. Had A Year of Pure Feeling moved them as much?
Seated in chairs, Mike Eaton, a Kiwi viticultural legend whom Hana had engaged to put this event together, introduced the young vintners one by one, and each stood to tell me their story and the wines they were vinifying. During the short presentations barrel samples extracted with wine thieves were poured into our wineglasses. All of them, men and women equally, were experimenting with extended skin contact on Sauvignon Blanc grapes of different clones to extract a flavor profile nonexistent in the commercial winemaking that had begun to dominate, and vitiate, the New Zealand wine industry. All the wines were unlike Sauvignon Blancs I had ever tasted before, and the future of New Zealand wines, I realized, was not only in the sublime Pinot Noirs coming out of Central Otago, but here at the Coterie in Marlborough, infamous for industrialized farming of Sauvignon Blanc for big producers making monochromatic swill for the masses. Kim Crawford. Villa Maria. Kono.
As the extraordinary tasting continued, Amanda grew increasingly intoxicated and belligerent. Hana, in horror, had retreated to the periphery, her female instinct about Amanda crucifyingly realized, evident in her downturned-mouth expression. Amanda, possessing only a smattering of wine knowledge, started critiquing some of the wines with offensively stupid comments like, “This tastes like dirt,” before discarding it in a floor drain. Following it with embarrassing bombast like, “What did you blokes and shirleys think of Miles’s new book? Fabulous, isn’t it?”
I pulled Jack aside. “You’ve got to get her out of here, Jackson.”
Jack looked nervously back and forth between the stricken face of Hana and the blowsy Amanda, who was now center stage impersonating a wine connoisseur. He moved toward her and grabbed her by the elbow. “Come on, honey.”
“What?” she cried. “I’m enjoying my wine.”
Against her vociferous expostulations, Jack frog-marched her out of the Coterie, much to the relief of Hana and the young winemakers.
I leaned against a barrel and turned to the nonplussed vintners and said, “I’m sorry. My friend Jack’s partner has had a little too much to drink. You should shoot for a lower alcohol next vintage,” I joked to their muffled laughter. I drew my hands together prayerfully. “You ridiculously young men and women are making some of the most cutting-edge, interesting wines I’ve tasted in a long time. I’m impressed. And I want to thank you for the extraordinary tasting. We don’t need to talk about my new book,” I finished.
“But we all read it,” spoke up a young woman.
“Okay,” I said. “What’d you think?” I sipped a Sauvignon Blanc that tasted of ocean and rare tropical fruits I couldn’t identify.
The young woman winemaker stabbed a finger at her chest. I nodded at her. “Is it hard for you to write from such a personal place?”
I looked at her, blinked, sucked in my breath. “I’m taking risks,” I started. “If I didn’t take risks, if I wrote formula fiction or, in this case, a saccharine work of semiautobiographical fiction, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. And yet in writing confessionally, from such a personal place, I incur, unwittingly, oftentimes, not always, the condemnation and outrage of others. I could ask you the same question: Is it hard to be making wines so sui generis, so unfashionable, so seemingly uncommercial, you risk going bankrupt?”
They looked at one another, smiling at the truth of my words.
“Wine is one thing,” spoke up a young guy with a patch of black hair embellishing his chin. “But you’re writing about yourself.”
“But your wines reflect you,” I said. “And yes, I’ve taken the personal to the human, to real people in my life, but I’m still no different in terms of taking risks. Yes, I could be sued . . .” I waited for the explosion of laughter to die. “And probably will be,” I said to more raucous laughter—the profusion of barrel samples liberating me to new heights—“especially that section about my ex-wife—all true, by the way.” I stared at the wine in my glass. It was cloudy because it was unfiltered and swirling with the lees of dead yeast and the must of skins deliberately not racked off to add complexity and depth. “But I’m going for the quintessence of truth.” I held up the glass. “Just as I believe you are going for the essence of this much-maligned Sauvignon Blanc grape.”
“That was beautiful,” Hana whispered in my ear after I had finished autographing all the winemakers’ copies of my book and we were heading out of the Coterie back to the camper van.
“The wines were extraordinary,” I slurred. “Thank you for taking me to this holy tabernacle of New Zealand wine. And sorry about Jack’s paramour’s embarrassing you.”
“She’s a live one,” Hana said.
When we got back to the space where we had parked our vehicles for the night, Hana and I stopped. The tent that the unstable Marlin Cruiser had mushroomed into—tentpoles that looked like giant toothpicks—was rocking precariously back and forth, seemingly in danger of tipping over. A woman’s voice was ululating in the throes of a cresting orgasm, shattering the quiet of the night. Jack was righting the ship.
I turned to Hana. “Oh, what an actor will do for the rent.”