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In Wine People, Michelle Wildgen dives into the rich and ruthless business of wine via the dueling perspectives of two young women working for a Manhattan importer.
While steely, pragmatic Wren learns the nuances of wine buying from her quixotic mentor, Sonoma-bred Thessaly prides herself on delivering top sales numbers alongside an eclectic cast of male colleagues. When succession for the company’s mercurial founder becomes uncertain, the two protagonists join forces in vying for the top spot.
This sharp novel takes us from tasting rooms in Europe, to the hills of Sonoma and the cornfields of Wisconsin, while exploring the complexities of female friendship and ambition. This is both a platonic love story and a dual coming-of-age tale, written in delectable prose. Wildgen possesses an impressive gastronomical lexicon and her writing is a feast for the senses.
Wine People is Wildgen’s fourth novel, released by the innovative new publishing house Zibby Books. Her previous books include Bread and Butter, But Not For Long, and You’re Not You. She’s a former executive editor for Tin House magazine, and now runs the Madison Writers’ Studio with novelist Susanna Daniel. I spoke with Wildgen over Zoom about her forays into food and wine; the intricacies of her character development; and the ways writing can shift power, among other topics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jenny Bartoy
I’ll start with the simplest question of all, or perhaps the hardest: where did the idea for this book come from?
Michelle Wildgen
When I was in college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the nineties, I got really into the idea of writing about food and wine. I got a job at L’Etoile, the best restaurant I could find, hoping that they would teach me. It was a serious place and you had to learn about the food and about the wine. The chef back then was considered the Alice Waters of the Midwest. She was married to a wine importer and I was introduced to the idea of wine dinners, where you have a meal designed around showcasing particular wines and the winemaker attends. Before then, I’d never thought about the producers and the wines that were made from just one little spot on the earth.
After I left that job, it kept on informing my writing. And about five years ago, I needed a new novel idea and just wanted to have fun. I thought a good friend of mine who works in the wine importing industry had an interesting story. So I started bugging people about wine and asking, if your friends work in wine, let me talk to them. I had to get to know that world before I had any idea what the story was going to be. After I had talked to a lot of people, I figured out who Wren was going to be. But I didn’t have anything for her to do until I realized she needed a foil. I talked to this woman named Jasmine Hirsch, who is a well-known Pinot producer in Sonoma, and she described growing up in the grape growing business and then learning to make wine—she became the seeds of Thessaly. And finally, I understood what I was going to do with this book.
Jenny Bartoy
The prose in Wine People is mouth-watering. You’ve done a good amount of nonfiction food writing for various publications like O magazine or Real Simple. How is writing food and wine for fiction a different animal?
Michelle Wildgen
Not much! If I were a food journalist, I would pay attention to what’s new, what are the trends. But when I write food essays, it is kind of similar to writing fiction. That’s the way that I love to think about food and wine: what does it tell me about character? How does it illuminate a moment? There’s something about those words on the page that makes me really happy. I feel like there’s something neurological, a little something pops off in my brain when I see certain food or wine words on the page. And it doesn’t happen to me with anything else.
Jenny Bartoy
Wine People is immersive in this way. We can almost taste food and smell wine and feel texture—it’s such a gift to the reader.
In Bread and Butter, your 2014 novel, you wrote about the restaurant business through the framework of family relationships. And in Wine People, you write about the wine business through the framework of female friendship. How did these two novels parallel or differ from each other?
Michelle Wildgen
For both of them, I had to think about what kind of people would be there, and how I could make that story interesting. If all I do is start off with, “here’s a restaurant,” then I will not have anything to structure it or make it interesting. With Bread and Butter, when I pictured family all working together in a restaurant that got passed down, I was bored. It wasn’t until I thought of the brothers, staggered with two of them working for one place, and the third one opening another, and them all working against each other, that I got interested. And I think that’s the same kind of mental process with Wine People. When I just had one person wandering around the wine world, I had nothing going on. But as soon as I could put her in opposition to another, then I figured out what to do.
Jenny Bartoy
A foe in this intimate context, whether family or friendship, is more compelling than a straightforward protagonist-antagonist relationship. When you love each other, it automatically heightens the stakes.
Michelle Wildgen
Yes, it’s always more interesting to write about somebody who is sometimes sympathetic and sometimes frustrating, than just a pure villain. If they hate each other, then as soon as one goes away, they’re done with each other and that’s it. But if they’re tied together, then you’ve got more to work with.
Jenny Bartoy
The wine import business seems largely male-driven. What creative doors did your female protagonists open in your writing?
Michelle Wildgen
I liked paying attention to the softer ways in which a male-dominated culture can be difficult to navigate. I was interested not so much in overt assault or sexist hiring practices, but rather in the ways that people who say they are enlightened and don’t think they are part of that culture are accidentally reinforcing it. I began paying attention to those microaggressions, and I definitely think that was because I had these women in that world.
Jenny Bartoy
During a trip to Europe, Thessaly says that more companies need a woman at the top, and her male superiors nod, but then Wren sees “in the way both men looked so blandly pleased by the vague notion of women running the wine world that it never occurred to them Thessaly might be talking about their own company.” This obliviousness continues throughout and feels enraging to your protagonists (and to your female readers). But that rage proves cathartic when you use it to propel a turning point. Was it validating for you to use storytelling as a way to enact power in a way that real life sometimes doesn’t allow?
Michelle Wildgen
I think that’s why I give my characters the strength of character that I wish I sometimes had more of. I feel like I’m not as confident in that way. So yeah, it’s really gratifying to let them be like, “Fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves.” That’s incredibly enjoyable to say. I was at dinner with my family a couple days ago, including my brother and his kids. And I said, “I was at this retreat all day,” and one of them said, “Oh, who’s running it?” And I was like, “I’m running it.” It was really gratifying to say, “I run that goddamn thing.” I understood what my characters were talking about.
Jenny Bartoy
Your two female protagonists are remarkably well developed, and they are opposite in every way, aside from their similar intelligence and competitive approach to the business. Wren makes the realization in the second half of the book that their opposition mirrors the dynamic of Lionel and Jonathan, the older male partners of the importing company. I wonder how deliberately you crafted these polarities.
Michelle Wildgen
At the Tin House workshop years ago, the writer Antonia Nelson talked about finding these oppositional forces in your fiction. That’s a really smart way to conceive of your characters and to have tension, but also to hold the story together. So I deliberately wanted them to be opposite, but I had to pay attention to making them more opposite, because for a long time, Thessaly wasn’t as clear internally as she was on the outside. It took me a long time to find whatever it was that made her vulnerable, in the way Wren is vulnerable from the start.
In paying attention to oppositional forces, I always knew that Jonathan and Lionel were set off against each other. And at some point, I realized that Wren and Thessaly were too, but they needed to be flipped. So the person who started off loyal to the poetic partner is actually very commercially minded because she needs security. I deliberately tried to shape this dynamic as I noticed it in other characters.
Jenny Bartoy
Thessaly comes from a strong and tight-knit family and seems crippled by self-doubt. She dreams of crafting esoteric small-batch wines, but for most of the book it’s unclear whether she ever will. Tell me about writing this character.
Michelle Wildgen
I thought of her in terms of having these really successful and sort of iconoclastic parents who created a world that she would not necessarily be able to replicate. And she’s always holding herself up against them, thinking, maybe I just don’t feel things as strongly or have as much intentionality as they do. And so that was how I saw her having this dream. But also she’s waiting too much for somebody to give her permission.
Jenny Bartoy
This feels so relatable to writers. Am I allowed to write about this? Am I good enough to succeed? Every writer I know is plagued by these questions.
Michelle Wildgen
The whole wine industry in many ways feels similar to publishing, because you’re making this thing and you don’t know how it will turn out. It’s a labor of love. And then you have to find people who can help you get it into the marketplace, and find a way to tell the story and draw a tantalizing picture. And you just hope that you find people who love it enough to do it. It’s weirdly analogous. I can definitely connect Thessaly’s fear to how a writer might feel imposter syndrome.
Jenny Bartoy
Wren’s character often seems to walk a tightrope, where control is her safety. She’s authentic and full of integrity—from her work ethic to her dating approach—but this desire for control manifests as making the reliable and reasonable choice in most situations. What was your thought process in crafting this character?
Michelle Wildgen
She’s one of those characters that came to me pretty early. I took a lot of her life background from a friend of mine, but then I gave her other traits. So her steeliness and that integrity and willingness to say, “No, this is how I’m going to do it and I won’t be cowed”—it’s something that I really admired about her, but I wanted it to also be a problem for her sometimes, because I think for most of us, that’s how it is, right? The things that are good about us are also the things that become a problem if we let them get out of hand.
Jenny Bartoy
Definitely. I admire you too for touching on difficult topics. In a novel that is very much a love letter to wine, one main character struggles with their alcohol consumption, and another character is a chronic alcoholic. Tell me about the choice to face this dark side of wine drinking head-on.
Michelle Wildgen
I don’t know that I would have, except that when I interviewed people, that just kept coming up. The alcoholism factor is not insignificant. And it seems to me that people either go a little crazy then find a way to manage it, or they never manage it and then it goes bad. At some point, you have to make a choice about how you are going to exist in the wine business. When you’re in this convivial world, like I used to be in the restaurant realm, at some point, you can’t keep up the lifestyle, you know? So I felt it was important for somebody to have to deal with that dark side and come to that reckoning.
Jenny Bartoy
A related difficult topic you cover is familial estrangement. Over a quarter of Americans are estranged from at least one family member, but it remains a taboo subject. In literature, reconciliation tends to be the expected resolution. Why did you steer away from this trope with Wren and her father?
Michelle Wildgen
I think if he had truly changed, she probably would have forgiven him and wanted that. But he just squandered her trust too many times. And that is maybe her gift and her foible. Of course, we like the idea of estranged family members coming back together, but people often don’t change and don’t become better versions of themselves. There are times when the right thing to do may be to let these people be separate from you, so you can be healthy. Reconciliation would have felt like a betrayal of her character.
Jenny Bartoy
I appreciate your willingness to explore that cultural discomfort and buck expectations.
In your last chapter, you write, “The pleasure in this wine was inseparable from sitting here. And as trite as being together and sharing wine sounded, it was also simply true.” After these characters have weathered such cutthroat competition and stress, it would be almost easy to forget the basic joy at the root of it. I love that you bring us back to that.
Michelle Wildgen
It really is the simple things that keep people coming back to this business and make it meaningful—I kept hearing people say that too. In the end, in order to consume this thing, we sit together, and we drink, and we usually have a meal together. And it’s hard to feel distant from people when you find yourself in this intimate situation.
FICTION
Wine People
By Michelle Wildgen
Zibby Books
Published August 1, 2023
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