Mouthfeel

Confessions of a Wine Slut

Working in a winery is not always the beautiful experience the bucolic setting suggests. A glance behind the “Employees Only” door often reveals an intimidating landscape of high drama and low morals, where good taste meets bad manners. This is where Mari Kane got her start in the wine business.

Mouthfeel: Confessions of a Wine Slut is the story of one woman’s search for love and livelihood in wine country. The story opens on a farm in Forestville, California, where Mari has moved from San Francisco into a cottage with her twelve-year old daughter and two cats, hoping to break into the wine business. She finds a job in a small family winery, enrolls in a wine marketing class, and soon finds herself immersed in the local wine culture.

She falls in love with one varietal after another – petite sirah, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay – and practically obsesses about California’s native wine, zinfandel. Mari takes a series of tasting room jobs where she encounters winemaker egos, owner disaffection, manager duplicity, customer boorishness, and a certain ‘Animal House’ mentality among cellar workers. She suffers them all just to be closer to the wine. She is, by then, a total wine slut.

After a harrowing brush with a gay cabal and the Reno mob, Mari begins to ask herself: Is pouring wine worth the paranoia? Where is the balance? Who does she have to sleep with to keep a wine job?

Mouthfeel is the first memoir to present an authentic and opinionated view of the Sonoma County wine scene. In many ways, it is similar to the book and movie, Sideways. But, where Sideways had fictional male characters viewing the wine industry from outside, Mouthfeel is the true-life story of a woman working on the inside. The book has enough obscure wine talk, vine crazed characters and cellar sex to amuse wine sluts around the world.

The finished manuscript totals 298 pages or 66,027 words.