Blackberry Wine

Blackberry Wine is a magical realism novel by Joanne Harris, published in 2000. In its British version it is narrated by a vintage bottle of wine, and it uses the split-narrative technique the author often favours, alternating between two timelines. One is set in Yorkshire and recounts several formative episodes in the adolescence of Jay Mackintosh, when he meets Joe Cox, the man who will become the greatest influence on his life and literary career. The other, set in the present day, takes place in the fictional village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, the setting of Harris's earlier book Chocolat. There Jay tries to recover the magic of those early years and overcome his writer's block.

Harris has said that her inspiration came from her Yorkshire grandfather, an ex-miner who kept an allotment and made wine from the fruit he grew. After his death she found bottles of this homemade wine in his house, and she wrote about them. The novel mixes third-person omniscient narration with occasional passages in the first person. The link it draws between taste and memory has led critics to describe it as Proustian.

The plot presents Jay as a writer who, after the success of Jackapple Joe, has been unable to repeat his triumph and now publishes second-rate science fiction under a pseudonym. Revisiting the places of his childhood, he discovers bottles of homemade wine that memory links to Joe, who vanished mysteriously years before. Under the wine's influence, Jay buys a house in Lansquenet and begins writing again, while he watches his reclusive neighbour Marise d'Api, a woman hiding a painful secret. The arrival of his former partner Kerry, with a plan for a publicity stunt, threatens to upset the life of the village.

The book deals with food, memory, nostalgia and the art of storytelling, with particular attention to taste, smell and the notion of terroir. Reviews were generally favourable, although some critics faulted its implausible twists. In 2000 it won Best Novel in the foreign and international categories at the Gourmand Awards, and in 2002 it received a Whitaker Gold Award.