by Mads Molnar III

A Brooklyn Wine Class and the Unfinished Story

I’d been thinking about this idea ever since a wine class in Brooklyn 7 years before. As we sniffed and snorted our glasses, the vintner leading the class paused his wine pitch to tell us a story from the French countryside in 1940. 

In May, the Nazis raged across the border of Germany through Alsace and did a little more looting than was seen later in the war. One French winemaker, upon getting word they’d raid his cellar next, poisoned a case of his best wine.

We had all stopped drinking and swirling. The vintner had our attention. Then he added, “No one knows what happened to the wine.” The class released a collective sigh before we poured the next glass. 

Traveling to the Scene of the Crime 

The story lodged in my subconscious, and reminded me of my grandfather’s biographical WWII tales. I mulled both over for years, until I found myself on a biodynamic vineyard in a little town called Katzenthal, working for a winemaker named Clément Klur.

We took in a harvest of grapes: gewurztraminer, pinot noir, pinot grigio and riesling. I stomped some with my bare feet freezing numb in the cold of the fall and pressed others in Klur’s large bladder press. My wife cooked giant family-style lunches for the workers and we finally, after weeks of work, rode through the little town on the harvest tractor wearing garlands of grape vines and singing in the end of harvest—La Fête des Vendanges. We got to taste the juice from the grapes that we’d harvested. And as I helped with the fermentation and was alone in the cellar surrounded by bubbling barrels of juice turning hard, I remembered the story from the tasting and my grandfather’s life. Now surrounded by the same world of wine, standing in a cellar in that same region of the world, 80 years later, the story began to bubble up in my mind like the wine and I began to write. 

My grandfather inspired the psychologist-turned detective protagonist, the wine class vintner inspired the plot and Clément Klur and his gorgeous town of Katzental inspired the winery and winemaker in the book. 

The ferment was soon finished and my writing broke from the early morning hours into other parts of the day. 

My wife and I traveled through France, Switzerland and Italy for months from one vineyard to the next. We ended up in New Zealand via Australia before I typed “THE END” and attained closure on the story of the poisoned case of wine. 

Writing Prompts for Fiction Authors

As a writer, have you ever had a life event shove you out of inertia and into writing a story? Here are a few questions and writing prompts for you, related to travel and expanding on true stories:

• The next time you travel, collect details from that place. It just might serve you in your next story. Take note of the smells and sounds, the personality of the people and the place’s history. And most importantly, ask questions of all the local people. If you can become curious to learn the history it will be fleshed out in your mind and be more real to readers.

• Are there details about people you’ve met or know that could inspire rich characters? Think about speech patterns, mannerisms, dress, physicality, habits, motivations and even the things that make that person angry.

• Is there a story you’ve heard that’s always stuck with you? Maybe from a class or from someone in your family, like grandparents?

• Is there a compelling true story with an unknown ending that you could finish?

If you’re a fan of fast-paced adventure and hard-boiled detectives such as Philip Marlowe, you may enjoy reading my take on the destination of the bottles of poisoned wine. The historical thriller is a story of murder, love and revenge that one early reader called “a wild ride through Europe during WWII.” Watch the book trailer and grab a copy of Pinot Noir: A WWII Novel here: www.pinotnoirbook.com 

By afternoon, he's a journalist who's won numerous writing awards; by evening, he's an award-winning film director and by early morning he's a fiction writer under the name Mads Molnar III. Pinot Noir is his first novel.