I finished Against the Day more than two months ago now. Or that’s when I read the last page anyway–who really ever finishes a Pynchon book. Drinking through it is sure going to take a while. The list is longer than for V, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon combined. And it’s fun stuff, distillations of many of the books diverse milieu, from Colorado to Siberia. Check it out.

Though there’s plenty of obscure spirits and good weird cocktails and in AtD, we’ve been pretty starved for wine around here lately (last one was Schloss Vollrads back last October), so I’m starting with some of that: Primitivo. It’s a red wine from the heel of Italy, closely related to Zinfandel.

About halfway through AtD, Dally Rideout (who we follow sporadically through much of her life) is living in Venice and going out with Hunter Penhallow, a painter arrived here from Greenland through diverse and possibly supernatural passages. They’re living happily bohemian. Page 584:

One day Hunter showed up in sunglasses, broad-brimmed straw hat, and fisherman’s smock. “Feel like getting out on the water?”

“Let me borrow a hat and I’ll be right there.”

They head out into the lagoon with an anarchist Futurist painter friend of Hunter’s called Andrea Tancredi and some others.

They picnicked on Torcello in a deserted pomegranate orchard, drank primitivo, and Dally found herself looking at Andrea Tancredi more than she could account for, and when he happened to catch her looking, he stared back, not angry but not what she’d have called fascinated either.

Torcello, our Great Guide says, is a quiet, sparsely populated Island in the north of the lagoon. Probably an ideal place to find a deserted pomegranate orchard. The whole island is actually pretty deserted–it was the most populous bit of Venice until the lagoon around it turned to swamp in the 12th century and everyone jumped ship. Now it’s home to ten people.

Primitivo seems like a good grape for the occasion. Based on the glass in front of me, it’s fruity and rich with a good wallop of tannins up the back. There’s a definite aniseed note too. But also all remaining somehow light and picnic-friendly. Lovely stuff. The Italian anarchist painters are successfully showing the foreigners how it’s done.