François-Henri Désérable turns to wine in The Palace

François-Henri Désérable found the subject of his next novel during a bicycle road trip through Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune vineyards in July 2020. He had, he said, an “intuition” that wine could make a superb novel.

The intuition soon became an obsession. “The intuition became an obsession, and how do you get rid of an obsession except by giving it 400 pages?” the writer wrote on Instagram before the publication of The Palace by Gallimard. He told his 28,600 followers that the book was waiting for them in bookstores.

The article frames wine as a world generally regarded as elitist, where the value and rarity of bottles fuel what it calls extraordinary speculation. Désérable’s earlier subjects included Che Guevara, Gary and Iran. This time, he has turned to the culture surrounding wine.

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Intuition became an obsession, and how do you get rid of an obsession except by giving it 400 pages?

A check at a local bookstore produced a less triumphant scene than the author’s announcement suggested. The Palace did not initially appear in the shop window or on the tables reserved for books favored by the booksellers. When it was eventually found, the novel had been pushed behind other major releases from the literary season.

The article ends as the bookseller pulls the title from behind the stack, beginning to explain that it is a book about wine before the subscription-only text cuts off.

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The Palace is waiting for you in bookstores.