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Little Toller Books buys Peter Hahn's wine memoir
Little Toller Books has announced that it is to publish Angels in the Cellar, the memoir of winegrower Peter Hahn, in April 2025.
It offers an account of how Hahn, "having suffered a breakdown, quit his successful career to become a small-scale grower of organic wine in the Loire Valley, reassessing not only his own life but the whole global economic system", Little Toller said.
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Adrian Cooper, co-founder of Little Toller, acquired world rights from David Godwin of David Godwin Associates. Angels in the Cellar will be published on 9th April, in hardback at £22.
The independent publisher said: “For the past 20 years, Peter Hahn has lived with his family at Le Clos de la Meslerie, a vineyard and smallholding in France’s Loire Valley, making small batches of prize-winning organic wine. In Angels in the Cellar, he invites us to spend a year in his company as he reflects on the land, his life and the lives of those who work with him. We join Peter through the seasons, pruning and harvesting the vines by hand, before following him back to the farm and into the cellar, where the alchemy of wine-making continues. With a poet’s eye, Peter describes in great detail the processes of working in the vineyards, the physical and emotional toil, as well as the joy of being a steward of the land."
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Gracie Cooper, publisher at Little Toller, said: "I was immediately captivated by Peter’s charming and original memoir. I would never have thought of publishing a book about wine. But the wonderful agent David Godwin insisted, and we soon realised that this was a book about nurture and growth that would give us a new perspective on climate change from the front line of growing, where people are seeking new ways to regenerate the land, the community and themselves. And while his account of his wine-growing year is beautiful, I was also moved by his commitment to farming more sustainably, his honesty and his integrity.”
Hahn said: “I am thrilled that my book has found a home with Little Toller. The book is the story of a return to a different way of life, one linked intrinsically to the cycles of nature and the land, one tied less to looking feverishly to the future but, rather, of taking the time to look back into the past and learn. I don’t think there is another publishing house in the UK that values stories about humankind’s relationship to nature, place and history as much as Little Toller does.”
