When acclaimed journalist Alan Deutschman found the California wine country mainly because the lucky house guest of very rich friends, he was surprised to discover a raging controversy. A civil battle was being fought between your Napa Valley, which epitomized elitism, prestige and wealthy excess, and the neighboring Sonoma Valley, a rag-tag bohemian enclave so stubbornly backward that rambunctious chickens wandered openly through town. However the antics actually began when new-money invaders started pushing out about A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth as well as the Fight for the nice Life in Napa and Sonoma Sonoma’s poets and painters to create way for luxury resorts and trophy homes that appeared a parody of opulence. AN ACCOUNT of Two Valleys captures these stranger-than-fiction locales with the wit of a Tom Wolfe novel and uncorks the amusing absurdities of lifestyle among your wine world’s glitterati.

Deutschman discovered that over the weekends the wine country was like a couple of gracious hosts smiling upon their guests, but during the week the families feuded with one another and their neighbours just like the Hatfields and McCoys. Napa was a comically distinctive club where the super-rich fought desperately to enter. Sonoma’s colorful free of charge spirits and iconoclasts were wary of their bohemia getting the next playground for the rapacious top notch. So, led by a previous taxicab drivers and wine-grape picker, a parmesan cheese product owner, and an musician who lived within a barn surrounded by outrageous peacocks, they shaped a populist revolt to seize power and repel the wealthy invaders.

Deutschman’s cast of characters brims with eccentrics, egomaniacs, and a incomprehensible man in black who crashed the elegant Napa Valley Wine Auction before proceeding to pay a half-million dollars for an individual bottle. What evolves is nothing significantly less than a battle for the good lifestyle, a clash between previous and new, the struggle for the spirit of one of America’s last items of paradise. A dishy glimpse behind the scenes of a Western Coast wonderland, A Tale of Two Valleys makes for intoxicating reading.