THE VINEYARD

On September 4th, Alice Tisdale Hobart's The Cup and the Sword (see p. 347) is to be published. Now comes this second book on California's wine industry, a book on a smaller scale, but a nice place of work, presenting with fidelity and sympathy the tradition of the vineyard, the devotion of the vintner to his fields. This is the story of one vineyard. Montino, of how Region had lowered its quality for bigger returns, and of how his son, Hector, is persuaded by Alda, daughter of an old grower, to bring back the finer vines, and how this policy is carried on by Cleve, Alda's adopted son. Montino regains its eminence -- and then is outlawed with Prohibition. Thus the story precedes the other in point of time, and is more wholly the story of the nature of an industry that is both a profession and a vocation and a way of life. Jones has caught the essential quality of these people, dedicated to the vineyards.