This fiercely independent woman lives alone with her deaf daughter, and although she resists all Jay's attempts to get to know her, he becomes increasingly fascinated by her.Īfter weeks of inspired writing, rewarding hard work in his gardens and revisiting the past through Joe's "Specials", Jay comes to feel that the life he is building for himself is more important than writing the great follow-up novel and that self-fulfilment is more alluring to him now than fame and notoriety. He begins to write a new book about Lansquenet and its inhabitants, whilst secretly observing his neighbour, the reclusive Marise d'Api, whose land borders his own. The estate, Joe's bottles of homemade wine ("The Specials") and vivid memories of Joe that gradually become more than simply memories, inspire Jay to write again for the first time in a decade, and to rediscover what truly matters to him.
He buys a house he has never seen in the French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes and moves there, ostensibly to write, but in reality to escape from Kerry, the pressures of fame and the expectations of his public. Under the influence of this magical home-brew, Jay finds himself behaving in a more and more erratic way. Blackberry Wine acquaints readers with Joe through flashbacks as, now aged 37 and feeling increasingly unfulfilled, Jay revisits his childhood haunts and discovers a box of Joe's "Specials", bottles of home-made wine that may hold the key to Joe's unexplained disappearance. It is a coming-of-age story, describing how Jay was befriended, following his parents' divorce, by an eccentric old man called Joseph Cox, a gardener, poet and everyday magician, with whom he was to forge a unique relationship. Jackapple Joe, Jay's only best-seller, was a nostalgic retelling of Jay's childhood summers in the Yorkshire town of Kirby Monckton. He lives in London with his ambitious girlfriend, Kerry, and teaches creative writing to vapid young students whilst living on his dwindling reputation. Having reached his artistic zenith with the award-winning 'Jackapple Joe', a novel published 10 years ago, he has failed to duplicate his earlier success, and now writes second-rate science-fiction novels under a pseudonym. Writer Jay Mackintosh is suffering from writer's block. Unusually, the US version of this book is significantly different from the original, with the US version written entirely in the third person, whereas the UK version is written from the somewhat whimsical point of view of a bottle of vintage wine. One is situated in Yorkshire twenty years earlier than the other, which is set in the fictional village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, the setting of her previous book, Chocolat. This story continues with her typical split-narrative technique and follows two separate timelines. Blackberry wine is a magical realism novel by Joanne Harris, published in 2000.
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