The Wine’s Anvil historical fiction novels tell the story of wine grapes as rarely imagined before. The stories of the series explore wine history and how culture and religion have impacted the development and popularity of wine grapes over time. A series of memorable characters and their inspiring adventures bring a little-told wine history timeline to life.
Here are the tasting notes for the current Wine’s Anvil chronology:
Wine’s Anvil
There were once a secretive people of the sea; their knowledge ancient, their skills legendary, and their archaic religion under siege. But on the sea they were free. To live. To explore. To trade.
Where the waves of the Great Sea wash onto their fragile world, a royal family tries to keep its trade routes a secret for one more generation. In their ship’s noble wake, a gifted winemaker and his grapevines join them to cross the Mediterranean on a doomed expedition to legendary Tartessus.
Stars and signs can guide the wise and confuse the foolish. Oracles see the hidden truths of life, seers see what is and isn’t ahead, and prophets foresee their fates entwined in the struggles of the immortal gods. Yet, the grapevine is the only genuinely timeless character in this story. How will a plant that cannot crawl across the ground more than a few feet learn to swim the sea? How will a vine entangle kings? How will a wine come to be a god?
Looking to buy? Wine’s Anvil is currently due out Fall 2019
Tynged
Red grapevines have finally taken root in the 8th century Loire Valley, but the wine has fallen from Royal favor. With her older brother away in the frontier it falls to imaginative young Princess Gisela to keep her favorite vines from disappearing forever.
When she finds herself swept along with a group of rebellious vineyard workers she is forced to cross the lines of privilege and culture. But what will it cost her body and soul to try to return the vines, her new friends, and herself into the King’s good graces?
Looking to buy? Tynged is currently available on Amazon in Kindle and in paperback.
www.amazon.com/Tynged
“En vino veritas!” Abbé Breton offered, toasting his pupil. “In wine is truth!”
“No, my dear Abbé,” Cardinal Richelieu corrected. “En vino arcana.”
“In wine are secrets,” Tiran translated with a raised glass.
Tiran has a lot on his mind for a young man. Wine. Women. Noble wars and religious uprisings. An overshadowing family name and a potential life of celibacy. All these thoughts conspire to send Tiran abroad across Europe during the early 1600s, but a disturbing apparition compels him to return to France and face them once again.
When an old mentor lures him back into the Loire Valley with an offer to help develop a red wine grape, Tiran thinks he may have finally found his peaceful life in the vineyards. As both Tiran and the wine catch the eye of the powerful Prime Minister Cardinal Richelieu, though, his mind only becomes more troubled by his choices.
Will Tiran lose himself entirely into the intrigues of Cardinal Richelieu’s spy networks? Will he drown himself in his passions of pleasure, to doom his name and soul forever, or will he surrender himself up to a life serving God in the clergy?
In the novels Children of Breton and Children of Breton; Hard Cane, our immortal red grapevine watches it all unfold, as, beneath its leaves, its clusters slowly mature into the Cabernet of today…
Looking to buy? Children of Breton is currently available on Amazon in Kindle and in paperback.
https://www.amazon.com/Children of Breton
Looking to buy? Children of Breton; Hard Cane is scheduled for release in 2020.
Children of Breton; King of the Son capstones the Tiran de Laval trilogy. As he wrestles with his wife’s recent death and the revealing details of her diary, seemingly meant to haunt him, an old friend comes to seek his help with a vineyard mystery. When the friend is subsequently kidnapped, Tiran sets out to rescue him, beginning a journey across Western France where he is forced to defend his life from wine thieves, and his family name from the church and the royal court.
The Changeling is an early 18th-century novel introducing Barbin Fortier, an aging son returning home from a life of youthful piracy to seek peace and take his place in a failing, once noble, family vineyard. His past keeps undermining his future as he navigates a journey of change in France, change in tastes in wine and a change in his own beliefs.
The Blackbird is a mid-18th-century mystery-romance. Old wine grower Joël-Gervais de Laval finds budding love with another witness amidst the intrigue of a local murder trial. As the trial slowly begins to take on a more national flavor the lovers are carried along, away from their vines, their wines, and their insular past lives.
