Simon Loftus presents us with a heady blend of family memoir with a history of Ireland, foregrounding the story of the Protestant Ascendancy families. What emerges, however, is also a meditation on the nature of memory, as the tall tales, legends and ghost stories combine to form a narrative of shifting moods and viewpoints.
For more than two hundred and fifty years wine lovers have claimed that the stony vineyard of Le Montrachet, which straddles the boundary between the villages of Puligny and Chassagne, produces the greatest dry white wine in the world. But few of those who search out this famous wine, as the grandest expression of the Chardonnay grape, take the trouble to explore the place itself. Life in Puligny is shaped by the rhythms of the agricultural year: the bonfires of the winter prunings, the Feast of St Vincent, and the exhausting, exuberant pandemonium of the harvest, when the population of the village trebles with the arrival of the visiting pickers