Rent The Mad Crush: A Memoir of Mythic Vines and Improbable Winemaking

Synopsis

"The first time Bill made wine, he was buck naked..."

So begins The Mad Crush, the improbable but true story about the making of one great wine and the souls who paved its way over a period of 115 years—including nude grape stompers, a freethinking village potter, a California surfing legend, a reclusive winemaker, the winemaker's ex-wife's one-legged boyfriend, and a mysterious dead coyote.

The Mad Crush starts when Bill Greenough, owner of Saucelito Canyon Vineyard in the wildlands of California's Central Coast, recruits author Christopher Weir to work the 1995 "crush"—the seasonal push to process the harvested grapes. What ensues is a life-changing harvest season like no other, during which a motley winery crew is challenged to make fine wine the hard way in the face of folly, adversity and even fire.

But while The Mad Crush revolves around the eyebrow-raising escapades of the 1995 crush, it ultimately tells the larger tale of a century-old Zinfandel vineyard and the adventuresome characters who have dared to call it home. Along the way, Weir unearths a trove of serendipitous stories, all of them somehow pointing the way to this remote place that cuts an unlikely path through the history of California wine.

From the planting of the vines in 1880 by an itinerant Englishman to Greenough's 1960s winemaking escapades in Santa Barbara's bohemian Mountain Drive community, The Mad Crush is not just an exploration of wine, but also a question of destiny.

"As a lover of California wines, I consider The Mad Crush a must-have...It's an in-depth and intriguing adventure into the heart and history of California wine."

-Don Dokken, heavy metal legend and wine connoisseur

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