In 1880, an Englishman named Henry Ditmas planted three acres of zinfandel grapes in the remote Saucelito Canyon east of Arroyo Grande. Nearly a century later, Bill Greenough, who’d been raised amid the hippie hedonism of Santa Barbara Mountain Drive community, purchased the property in 1974 and unearthed the forgotten vines. Then in 1995, Greenough hired a young, somewhat aimless, aspiring writer named Sean Christopher Weir to work the harvest, and Weir wound up reaping much-needed direction in his life.
Those elements are blended together in Weir’s new memoir, The Mad Crush. The 160-page romp through Central Coast history and the process of winemaking is a quick and lively read, perfect for anyone with any shred of interest in wine. The Sonoma-raised, Cal Poly-educated Weir, who’s run the San Luis Obispo County media relations firm Mooncatcher for 12 years now, spoke to me on the phone last month. What follows is a streamlined version of our conversation.
What made you write about this experience now? Even at the time, I had the sense that there were weird and wonderful things happening during that harvest season, so I did take some notes. Bill is a man of few words, but he would tell these stories that were almost hard to believe, like stomping grapes in the nude on Mountain Drive, how some Englishman went to the middle of nowhere to plant a vineyard in 1880, and how Bill, a hundred years later, fished these old vines out of the scrub brush with a pick and shovel. The stories seemed larger than life to me.