Product Description

Set in Hollywood, Paris, Bordeaux, and Marseille, Peter Mayle’s newest and most delightful novel is filled with culinary delights, sumptuous wines, and colorful characters. It’s also a lot of fun.

The story begins high above Los Angeles, at the extravagant home and equally impressive wine cellar of entertainment lawyer Danny Roth. Unfortunately, after inviting the Los Angeles Times to write an extensive profile extolling the liquid treasures of his collection, Roth finds himself the victim of a world-class wine heist.

Enter Sam Levitt, former corporate lawyer, cultivated crime expert, and wine connoisseur. Called in by Roth’s insurance company, which is now saddled with a multimillion-dollar claim, Sam follows his leads—to Bordeaux and its magnificent vineyards, and to Provence to meet an eccentric billionaire collector who might possibly have an interest in the stolen wines. Along the way, bien sûr, he is joined by a beautiful and erudite French colleague, and together they navigate many a château, pausing frequently to enjoy the countryside’s abundant pleasures.

The unraveling of the ingenious crime is threaded through with Mayle’s seductive rendering of France’s sensory delights—from a fine Lynch-Bages and Léoville Barton to the bouillabaisse of Marseille and the young lamb of Bordeaux. Even the most sophisticated of oenophiles will learn a thing or two from this vintage work by a beloved author.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6215 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-20
• Released on: 2009-10-20
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307269010
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
A Q&A with Peter Mayle

Question: The Vintage Caper begins and ends in Los Angeles, which you’ve not explored before in your writing. What led you to set parts of the book there? Are you a fan of the city?

Peter Mayle: The inspiration for the story came from California, and so L.A. seemed a logical place to start. Also, I had long cherished an urge to stay at the Chateau Marmont, which I was able to do in the worthy name of research. Very nice it was too. As for the city, I was unable to find the centre, but those parts I did see I enjoyed.

Question: Where did the character of Danny Roth come from?

Peter Mayle: Danny Roth is a mixture of several movie people and agents I’ve met over the years—quick-witted, talkative and relentlessly self-absorbed.

Question: This book is a bit of a love letter to the city of Marseille, which isn’t a place that usually inspires such rapturous praise. Do you think it’s underrated?

Peter Mayle: Marseille is certainly underrated, and I think it still suffers from the reputation gained in The French Connection.Marseille’s problem is that it is not a city that makes an effort to put itself out for strangers. It is what it is, take it or leave it—patches of squalor next to buildings and neighborhoods of great beauty; a tremendously mixed population, with origins in France, North Africa, and Italy; the almost religious support of Olympique de Marseille, the local soccer team; the pride in all things Marseillais, from its bouillabaisse to its soap; the highly vocal distrust of the government in Paris—all this I find fascinating. And then there are the people ofMarseille, known throughout France as masters of exaggeration. Nowhere else in the world will you find the humble sardine described as a shark. In other words, Marseille is a great stew of a city, filled with terrific things for writers to get their teeth into.

Question: What led you to write about a wine theft? What kind of research did you do for the book?

Peter Mayle: I read an article in The Herald Tribune about a robbery carried out in California, one in which the thieves concentrated on the very sell-stocked wine cellar, ignoring everything else. I don’t knowif theywere ever found, but the unusual precision of the robbery intrigued me. Why did they just steal wine? Presumably they were going to sell it, but to whom?And how did they get into the house and clean away? The more questions I thought about, the more it seemed as though the answers would make a great story. And the research, focused as it was on wine, was delicious.

Question: Have you had the pleasure of trying any of the wines that were stolen from Danny Roth?

Peter Mayle: Yes, but not often enough. In fact, I’ll never make a serious wine connoisseur. Taking small and reverent sips is not for me; I like to drink a wine rather than worship it. Give me a well-filled glass and a second bottle waiting in the wings and I’m happy.

Question: This is your first novel since A GOOD YEAR in 2004, though you’ve published two works of nonfiction, CONFESSIONS OF A FRENCH BAKER and PROVENCE A-Z, in the interim. What prompted you to return to fiction—or turn back to nonfiction in the first place?

Peter Mayle: I enjoy writing fiction because there are no restrictions; you’re inventing. And I enjoy nonfiction because you don’t have to make it up; you’re describing. Choosing between the two depends entirely on the subject and the idea, and THE VINTAGE CAPER came about because of an idea prompted by that newspaper story.

(Photo © Jean-Claude Simoen)

From Publishers Weekly
Mayle uncorks a winning wine caper in the tradition of To Catch a Thief. When a hot-shot Hollywood lawyer's most treasured and expensive wines are stolen, his insurance company calls in Sam Levitt, a gourmand and lawyer-of-all-trades with a varied background, to investigate. The investigation takes Sam to Paris and Bordeaux, where he hooks up with the elegant insurance agent Sophie Costes, a fellow wine and food snob. The trail finally leads them to a man named Francis Reboul in Marseille, and soon, with the help of Sophie's journalist cousin, Phillipe, they get an in with Reboul and close in on closing the caper. While the plot may be predictable, the pleasures of this very French adventure—and there are many—aren't in the resolution, of course, but in the pleasant stroll through the provinces and in the glasses of wine downed and decadent meals consumed. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
“Peter Mayle . . . has been celebrating the pleasures of Provence in seductive prose since the mega-bestselling A Year in Provence . . . This tradition flourishes anew in his latest Provençal picaresque, The Vintage Caper . . . The [novel’s] trail leads—naturellement!—through a succession of excellent repasts and leisurely ambles, which Mayle depicts with painterly ease and signature savoir vivre . . . The wine case has enough twists and turns to propel the plot along, but the star of this caper is the vineyard-veined, lavender-scented, sun-showered, garlic-seasoned setting itself: pure Provence.”
            -Don George, National Geographic Traveler (Book of the Month)
 
“Meals are lovingly described, scenery comes to life, paragraphs take long floral detours. And everyone is blessed with hypersensitive taste buds . . . By the time Levitt returns to America, readers will have learned much about the history of winemaking, the key wine regions, various auction houses, critics and books—and even how to lift fingerprints from bottles.”
            -James Oliver Curry, The New York Times Book Review
 
“A lighthearted romp through Bordeaux and Marseille, in which picking the right restaurant, choosing the best dish on the menu and, of course, finding the perfect wine (and female companion) to accompany the feast is every bit as important as catching the thief . . . Bon appétit!”
            -Bernadette Murphy, Los Angeles Times
 
“Wine and food aficionados will find much to savor in The Vintage Caper . . . The Vintage Caper is light, funny, and packed with a menu’s worth of scrumptious descriptions of exceptiona...

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Customer Reviews

Light beach fiction
Fun, well-constructed tale. Keeps moving. Written with Mayle's typical cleverness and skill with phrasing. But it's very *light* fiction. It's plot-driven vs character-driven. Reading "A Year in Provence" makes one think. Heck, Mayle himself -- as a reluctant "character" -- revealed the evolution of his own biases over the course of that book. That was excellent: the writer as unwilling participant, revealing more about himself to the reader than perhaps he intended as the writer.

There's nothing like that here. It's a good story, with pleasant characters and a lot of fun. But it won't leave you contemplating anything more serious than why you haven't had a good bouillabaisse for a while.

This is the kind of book that only authors with several best sellers to their credit get to publish. If a first-time author were to approach a publisher with this manuscript, it would never see the light of day. But Mayle is a brand. And I'm a fan of that brand. So I'm happy to have read it and enjoyed it very much. But I hope you'll find it useful to know that it's at the lighter end of the Mayle spectrum (like, say, Grisham's "Playing for Pizza").

Enjoy! (Under the sun)(Tuscan or otherwise)

amusing crime caper
Hollywood entertainment lawyer Danny Roth cherishes his wine collection, insured for three million dollars. He is so full of pride over his vintage collection he boasts excessively about his vino darlings during a Los Angeles Times interview. However, Danny feels violated when someone who obviously read the article absconded with his wine collection.

Insurance agent Elena Morales hires her former boyfriend Sam Levitt, a wine connoisseur, to investigate the theft. He follows the trail to France where he teams up with insurance agent Sophie Costes, a wine and food gourmand. They soon track the purloined wine to Marseilles with billionaire wine collector Francis Reboul as the prime suspect behind the theft.

This is an amusing crime caper that will have readers toasting Peter Mayle with A Good Year French champagne. The story line is fast-paced and straightforward as the shortest distance between California and French Lessons is between Sam and the other players. With a solid cast, Vintage Caper is lighthearted fun as each key participant makes their play for the valuable vino with not one of them fully trusting any of the others.

Harriet Klausner

Best Mayle Novel Yet
I have collected all of Peter Mayle's books after becoming a "Year in Provence" fan. While enjoying his novels some are better than others. Took this one out at library and found it best one yet. Very entertaining and for those who are Peter Mayle fans can highly recommend it. Liked it so much that I went ahead and bought copies for Christmas presents and for my Mayle collection. Whether he is considering this as a one off for his character or developing the principal character for future books I found this one an enjoyable read.