A Good Year

Max Skinner's boss takes the credit for a deal he has just closed, and Max walks out of the London finance house where he traded. Not long after, he learns that his uncle Henry has left him Le Griffon, a house and twenty acres of vineyard in Provence where he spent his boyhood summers. He goes down intending to sell it. The house is large and derelict, the soil is thin, and the wine the estate makes from its own vines is undrinkable.

The wine is the plot. The vigneron who works the land has for years been growing an unofficial cross of his own on a stony patch at the edge of the property, and what comes off that patch is extraordinary. The whole vintage goes out in secret, collected at night by unmarked truck and sold on under a name that never touches the estate's books. Christie Roberts, a young American who turns up saying Henry was her father, is the one who spots what the stony patch is worth; the rest comes out when the vineyard is condemned and the vigneron confesses. Mayle writes the eating and the heat at length and with obvious pleasure.

It lands for readers who liked A Year in Provence and wanted a story running through it. The reservation is that the book is comfortable to a fault. The fraud is genial, nobody is ever in danger, the romance arrives on schedule, and the people running the scheme are handled as rogues rather than thieves. Mayle is not really building a mystery. He is building a place worth wanting to be in, and the mystery is what keeps a reader there long enough to eat several more meals.