New zealand, p.1
New Zealand, page 1
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BOOKS BY REX PICKETT
the sideways series
Sideways
Sideways Oregon
Sideways Chile
Sideways New Zealand
standalone novels
The Archivist
SIDEWAYS NEW ZEALAND
REX PICKETT
Copyright © 2024 by Rex Pickett
E-book published in 2024 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design and illustration by Kathryn Galloway English
All rights reserved. This book or any portion
thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner
whatsoever without the express written permission
of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations
in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead,
is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 979-8-212-18028-3
Library e-book ISBN 979-8-212-18027-6
Fiction / General
Blackstone Publishing
31 Mistletoe Rd.
Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To my special needs cat, Max
INTRODUCTION
Given that it would soon land like an atomic bomb in California wine country, it is hard to remember that upon its release, Sideways was one of the great mishandled works of American literature at the turn of the century. Miles, a down-and-out author and the protagonist of the story, however, would have been reminded immediately of Herman Melville after the ruinous publications of his critically reviled novel Moby-Dick and his final work, Clarel. Not only was the latter remaindered—written off and sold to sellers for a few cents—but when readers proved unwilling even to pay pennies for the book, Melville’s publisher forced him to sign, personally, the form ordering the book’s pulping.
Moby-Dick and Clarel, of course, survived the caprices of the publishing industry, and so too has author Rex Pickett’s masterwork, Sideways. The novel owes its rediscovery to Alexander Payne’s film of the same name, and its literary longevity to the authenticity oozing from every page. Miles knows wine because Pickett knows wine. Miles knows the pain of the publishing world because Pickett knows that pain too well. And anyone who has ever loved and lost can experience the paralyzing pain and loneliness felt by Miles in the aftermath of a collapsed marriage and an ex-wife moving on with her life.
Sideways moved mountains in the wine world, not because Rex Pickett set out to change the way we think about wine, but because he tapped into an unrecognized truth about wine’s place in the human experience. One need not be a wine connoisseur, own a EuroCave, or recognize the name “Riedel” to know instinctively that after a wedding ceremony, you raise a glass of champagne to the newlyweds. The first miracle of Christ was turning water into wine. The first thing Noah did after stepping off the ark was plant a vineyard. Wine was inseparable from the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece. On a first date at an expensive restaurant, the wine list becomes a leather-bound minefield; what one chooses says as much about his or her character as the conversation to come. Rarely has ordering the cheap stuff by the glass been considered the safest path to a second date.
Regardless of one’s country or culture, wine has always been fully integrated with our lives, yet few have managed to capture in literature why that is or what its implications might be. When Sideways the novel and Sideways the film caught fire, Merlot was, at the time, having a moment on the wine scene. It had become the inescapable grape dominating restaurant menus after the “big Napa Cab” had exhausted our palates. Pickett, through Miles, asserted that the emperor had no clothes and, more importantly, humanized an alternative. Pinot Noir, said Miles, “enchants me, both stills and steals my heart with its elusive loveliness and false promises of transcendence. I loved her, and I would continue to follow her siren call until my wallet—or liver, whichever came first—gave out.”
No novel before or since has so fundamentally transformed the $64 billion American wine industry. After Miles snarled famously—both in the novel and on film—that he would storm out of a double date if anyone ordered a bottle of Merlot, Pinot Noir grape growing in California rose over 650 percent over the ensuing years, while Merlot decreased. Economists called it the “Sideways Effect.” Twenty years later, Pinot Noir outsells Merlot by hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States, the exact opposite of things before Rex Pickett had his say.
The reason, on some level, is obvious. Never had anyone so romanticized a grape and, by extension, its wine. Indeed, Sideways introduced many casual wine drinkers to the idea that varietals yielded wines of different character. Moreover, Pickett’s prose ripped down walls and made wine an egalitarian pursuit. After Sideways, the domain of fine wine no longer belonged exclusively to some monocled aristocracy. Rather, he gave wine back to the common person—the people to whom it always truly belonged. Vineyards are just farms with the same John Deere tractors, country music stations, and manure-covered boots found on Kansas cornfields. And if Miles, a lonely, starving writer one week away from eviction, could so relate to wine—could, indeed, find a momentary transcendence for which each of us in some way pines—then perhaps, too, could we through wine.
Beyond the bottles sold, the blockbuster film, the Academy Awards, and the transformation of Santa Ynez from “the poor man’s Napa/Sonoma,” as Pickett described it, to a thriving tourist destination, a word must be spared for the undeniable literary achievements of Sideways. It is a beautifully written novel: sensitive, evocative, and sparing, with dialogue at once genuine, joyful, awkward, and moving. Pickett’s darkly humorous prose captures the pathos that underlies life—that, indeed, makes life worth living. We are going to die, each of us, and every good conversation, lively or muted, jubilant or melancholy, is driven on some level by that one simple fact.
But not yet. And so we reach firmly for the corkscrew and grab the bottle by the neck, and twist the one into the other. Beneath that two-inch cork is an elixir sublime, that in turn can fuel sublime experiences. That is what Rex Pickett understood when writing Sideways and what readers learn with each elapsing page of one of the great literary works of our age.
—David W. Brown,
wine essayist and
author of The Mission
And what if one of the gods does wreck me out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too. For in my day I have had many bitter and painful experiences in war and on the stormy seas. So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more.
―Homer, The Odyssey
CHAPTER 1
“Dear Miles, I hope this finds you well. I don’t know if you remember me, but this is Milena Ernst. I’m the woman you met at L’Auberge Hotel in Del Mar, California, some two decades ago . . .”
I closed my eyes and sighed through my nostrils, breathing slowly in and out. Images flash flooded over me, spreading across the arid plane of memory, geologically buried deep below the bright strata of consciousness. After reading the lengthy, disturbing, heart-stopping email, I closed my laptop, set it on the coffee table, and straightened from the couch in the splendor of the Prophet’s Rock Winery guest cottage, located three miles up a winding dirt road and perched sentinel on a knoll in Central Otago, New Zealand, where I had been bivouacked for the past year and a half. Wandering—staggering is more like it after the shocking email!—over to the amber-tinted windows, I was focused both inward and outward. Inwardly, I kept trying to conjure Milena. Yes, the name resounded in me, clamorously and sonorously at the same time, an arrow launched from a past across vast oceans to a present where I have often found myself in purgatorial limbo. Outwardly, I gazed in stupefaction at the mountains in the distance. Snow draped over the Pisa Range like a gigantic tattered white throw tossed haphazardly on the back of a colossal brown sofa. Below me and to the right stretched vineyards, their deciduous rootstock denuded of their summer verdancy, a bronzed barren patchwork of vines glinting in the wintry afternoon sunlight. Two years ago, with the help of an aspiring Kiwi publisher, I had accepted a fellowship to teach creative writing at the University of Otago in Dunedin, located on the South Island, and to set to work on a new book, a quasi-sequel to a successful one I had written a decade before, which had been adapted into a film that had brought me a sliver of ephemeral fame. Ephemeral being the key adjectival modifier. My whole life was riddled with modifiers.
I fell in love with the south of the South Island, and fed up with the US and the barbarous film business, I had gone out on a limb, cashed out some 401(k)s before their maturation, and invested in half a hectare of Pinot Noir vines in the Bendigo region of Central Otago and named it Miles’s Lot, not unaware of the irony. When the semester had ended, I had an opportunity to continue working on my book at the Prophet’s Rock Winery guesthouse, situated next to my half hectare of precious vines, thanks to the serendipitous meeting of a woman winemaker. I had officially become an expat in New Zealand. With the Kiwi publisher on board to publish my book and a modest advance in hand, I wrote and loved and prayed my Pinot Noir would one day produce greatness. A year and a half flew by. Perhaps the happiest of my life. That the balloon of my happiness would be punctured by one email had seemed inconceivable only moments before.
At the window I sucked in my breath and then let it all go in an exhalation that fogged the glass: the leg-vibrating news in the email that found me halfway across the planet in a rare moment of peace and tranquility; the winter pulchritude of Prophet’s Rock; my first book in years in the process of publication; and the new uncertainty all of the above would entail that was about to rain down on me. Outside it was no more than forty degrees. Below my hilltop perch unfurled vineyards and scrubland suffering in these mica- and quartz-rich schist soils broken down over millennia from metamorphic evolution. I was existentially unmoored, once again without a true home, adrift in the New World wine region of Central Otago, fifteen miles outside the placid, scenic town of Cromwell. South of me lay Queenstown, an Aspen sister city so assailed by cyclonic winds jetliners often had to abort and reattempt landings more than once, sometimes even having to divert to nearby Christchurch or, God forbid, return to Auckland. South of Queenstown was flung the end of the world, the jumping-off point to Antarctica. I found solace in the realization I was close to the end of the world, a forbidden icy realm radically different from where I had grown up (San Diego) and where I had suffered for my writing, like my vines for their grapes, and despaired so much (Los Angeles, Hollywood, whatever you want to call that abominable megalopolis where moths to the flame had fluttered for a century, only to have their improbable hopes and dreams thwarted, silenced, derailed, or crushed in the heart of their selfsame yearning, and at one time unspoiled, soul). Here at Prophet’s Rock I had discovered, like the gold prospectors who came and perished in crude limestone hovels centuries ago, a singular purity, a cleansing, an expiation, if you will, of all my transgressions, all my regrets, all my loathing of a world that had crawled to the precipice of everything despicable certain human beings could exact on one another, a world clinging to the friable edge of an impendent violent revolution. I had come of age in America’s most prosperous time, and over the years I had watched it slowly crater, terrifyingly devolve into a country obsessed with greed, fame, hypocrisy, and worse. Its swaggering toxicity had riven my soul, and when I was vouchsafed an opportunity to move to New Zealand to teach and to write a book that had been annealing too long in the intracranial theater of my imagination, I leaped tangle-footed and headlong at the chance. And then I met a woman, as love would unexpectedly happen, and my life both grew richer and became complexified, but in magical ways that reinvigorated my cynical spirits with wellsprings of new hope. Ella—more in a minute. But the email from . . . Milena . . . was crucifying me on the cross of a distant past as I frantically cycled through the rhythms of remembering, desperately trying to fit this woman into the jigsaw puzzle that composed the unsettling vicissitudes of my roustabout, if at times colorful, life. No matter how far away you go, in this modern, technological age, you can’t escape your history.
“Dear Miles,” I started rereading from the beginning, still in a state of shock and disbelief over my first read, this time from my iPhone before a knee-weakening view that could have been a million years ago, the landscape was that pristinely beautiful. “I hope this finds you well. I don’t know if you remember me, but this is Milena Ernst. I’m the woman you met at L’Auberge Hotel in Del Mar, California, some two decades ago. Now and then I have wondered whatever happened to you. I followed your success with your book and your movie. Stung to realize you were still married when we found intimacy by the beach (O, the crashing surf of Del Mar!), but that was long ago, and hopelessly fated to come to nothing (distance, expectations)—it doesn’t matter now. I see from your rare social media posts you’re in New Zealand, teaching, writing another book. I hope it’s going well . . .
“You’re of course wondering why I’m reaching out to you after all these many years of silence and lives lived apart. Fear not, I’m not after any of your celebrity. Nor am I reaching out to simply say hi. There’s something important I need to tell you . . .”
I rose again from the couch I had drifted backward to, disoriented. In the refrigerator I pulled out a bottle of Prophet’s Rock Chardonnay, made by my winemaker friend Paul Pujol working with grapes grown at the Kopuwai Delta vineyard on the valley floor abutting Lake Dunstan. I poured half a glass and admired it in the light. It was two hours before my self-imposed allowable first pour, but I needed its anesthetizing anodyne, its liberating properties that would assuage all revelations, no matter how distant or from someone so far—and so briefly—in my past. Disinterring the memory of Milena, and the news she felt compelled to tell me across oceans and continents and time, was going to take courage. Chardonnay from Central Otago is as unique as any from Burgundy. In these nearly infertile soils, composed of only 3 percent organic matter, vines struggle to find sustenance, shooting their taproots deep on a quest for water and nutrients, hurtling all their propagating properties to their sole destination: their fruit. The vine suffers, its leaves etiolate, turning ocher and yellow as the clusters of berries intensify with phenolics and sugars, then, if it’s Pinot Noir, coloring a dark violet, a lustrous black, and extracting all the life the soil can afford to surrender, as if it were their only purpose, but in truth, by planting them here they had become enslaved plants, not wanting to live this cruel existence in this harsh climate for the sole purpose of satisfying the palates of oenophiles thousands of miles away. But they do. And if they were sentient creatures, like my beloved special needs cat, Max (more in a minute), I would feel ashamed to be a vineyard owner in this forsaken land where Pinot Noir, like me, knows that suffering and hardship yield the most sublime fruit for the alchemization known as wine. “They don’t want to live this life,” Rudi Bauer, the legendary winemaker of nearby Quartz Reef winery, lectured to me, telescoped forward over a bar table at the Bannockburn Hotel’s restaurant in an intense conversation where I was trying to learn about growing Pinot Noir in Central Otago and he was intent on explaining why nothing should be grown here, obsessed as he was with the suffering of all living things, sentient and plant life, as if they were married in some kind of holy matrix. But I digress.
