Noah Gordon's "The bodega"

This is not a work of high-brow literature, but you would not expect it from this author anyway. It has the usual Gordon plot of a young person with a more than questionable future who then succeeds against all odds due to hard work, self-discipline and a lot of luck.
What distinguishes this novel is its setting in a Catalan wine-growing region in the second half of the 19th century. Gordon has a fine eye for the details of wine-growing and the various factors that lead to a good wine, such as terroir, climate, hard work, the right mix of grape varieties, storage, etc.
The story is set against the background of the "Carlist civil war". Gordon's hero undergoes a long preparatory process for a war in which he will finally not fight. The narration of how he gets out of more than one desperate situation makes for entertaining bedtime reading.
Recommended if your are interested in 19th century Spanish and Catalan social history and/or wine-growing in general, as a lof of the labor-intensive process still remains basically the same today.

Odd is that Gordon sets his novel in a Catalan landscape and then uses the Spanish word "bodega" in the the English title, instead of the Catalan "celler". Odder still is its German title "Der Katalane" (the Catalan).