Josip Novakovich's Vignettes offers a wide-ranging look at his life, including his youth in hometown Daruvar, Croatia, where he attended school in a castle on a hill with barrels of whites and reds stored in the basement, "my peers and I learned the basics of math, grammar, history, and literature, somewhat dizzy and fumigated in wine vapors that seeped upward through the oiled oak floors."​ Over the course of seventeen short stories, Novakovich traces his relationship with wine: "Wine may have a lot to do with my interest in literature, or it may be the other way around-I am not sure which came first, those vapors, or the stories involving wine? And so, a bit of wine, in a small glass, a bit of truth, in a few lines."​