446: James Conaway is a Moralist in the Valley

I'll Drink to That! Wine Talk

Levi Dalton

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4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2018

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

James Conaway is the author of "Napa: The Story of an American Eden," "The Far Side of Eden: New Money, Old Land, and the Battle for Napa Valley," and "Napa at Last Light: America's Eden in an Age of Calamity," a trilogy of books about wine and wineries in California's Napa Valley.

James argues that serious changes are needed if the Napa Valley is to survive as an agricultural eden in the future. He points out threats to the Valley from climate change, limited resources, increased vineyard and winery development, and an emphasis on welcoming more and more tourists to the area. He explains that for him wine has a moral component which is often ignored, and argues that a wine choice is also a political choice.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.
0:05.0	I'm Levy Dalton.
0:06.0	I'm Aaron Scala and here's our show today. Oh, James Conway of the Napper trilogy, a series of three different books that
0:29.2	chronicle the changes and challenges in the Napa Valley. Hello, sir, how are you?
0:33.2	I'm well, thanks.
0:34.0	How are you?
0:34.6	Very nice to see you.
0:36.0	Good to see you, Leby.
0:37.5	So you grew up in Memphis and you thought of yourself kind of early on as a writer.
0:42.6	I did.
0:44.1	I started writing really when I was 12 or 13 or something like that.
0:49.2	I had this itch to write on my grandmother's typewriter, which I did, and then in high school I got interested
0:57.4	in writing poetry, and then I got into writing fiction when I was in college.
1:04.0	And you got a scholarship to Stanford?
1:06.0	Sometimes in life things, luck is just a factor in the success of a writer and probably in the success of anyone else and you
1:16.7	have to admit that at some point. That not everything we do and achieve is totally due to our own talents or abilities and that was a
1:27.3	clear watershed event for me not so much that I learned to write at Stanford I
1:32.4	already knew how to write really I mean I'm not not
1:35.0	I already knew out to write at Stanford. I already knew out of right, really. I mean, I'm not bragging. I'm just saying I'd done so much of it by the time I got there.
1:40.0	My style had not totally been formed, but it was coming close. Southern writers, we have to really
1:46.9	be careful not to sound like Faulkner. You know, Faulkner was such a wonderful writer and the prose is seductive and I think I still had some Faulkner in my writing at that time, but what it really did was got me out away from my hometown to which I never
2:07.6	returned to live and introduced me to the world at large and I suddenly realized how big the world was and I took a job as a newspaper reporter for the Times-Picayune New Orleans after I was at
	...

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