Puns, often of the ludicrously bad-good variety, are a significant Pynchonian sideline. The classic might be Gravity’s Rainbow‘s “For DeMille, young fur henchmen can’t be rowing,” but we could fill volumes quoting them from across the oeuvre—probably about nine volumes. For many of us, or for me at least, these Pynchonian puns exemplify a chief delight of his novels. It’s their dedicated, resilient silliness, the outrageous lengths to which they will go to set up a dumb joke, and the way that this apparent unseriousness stands stubborn against the malevolent forces we might find portrayed on the facing page, forces seeking to mechanise and reduce all life to a capital logic.

Bleeding Edge brings us an intriguing, not entirely typical specimen of Pynchonian pun. At the opening of Chapter Three, Maxine has just ushered Reg Despard, documentary filmmaker friend, from her apartment. He’d brought up some bad memories:

The past, hey no shit, it’s an open invitation to wine abuse. Soon as she hears the elevator doors close behind Reg, Maxine heads for the refrigerator. Where, in this chilled chaos, is the Pinot E-Grigio? “Daytona, we’re out of wine again?”

“Ain’t me drinking that shit up.”
“Course not, you’re more of a Night Train person.”

Bleeding Edge, p. 20.

A pun, generally, squints in two directions. GR’s “fur henchmen” reference both the elaborate narrative Pynchon has built up and the forty million Frenchmen who can’t be wrong. Maxine’s oenological pun, however, seems to loop back on itself instead. Instead of taking some external referent to play with, “Pinot E-Grigio” keeps things in house, punning egregiously on pinot grigio, with the other half of the pun being its own egregiousness. It forms a lexical ouroboros, feasting on itself (but never escaping its essential egregiousness). Its a recursive pun—appropriate, I suppose, to the nested world(s) of hashslingrz coders Maxine is drifting into.

What particular wine would best embody the Pinot E-Grigio? In search of maximum egregiousness, I have elected to make a Pinot Grigio myself—and not from grapes, but from concentrate!

I bought an Italian Pinot Grigio kit from a homebrew shop. It contained a big plastic sack of not-so-appealing brownish liquid and various sachets of chemicals. I diluted the liquid as instructed, added some of the chemicals and some yeast, and it fermented away. I monitored it closely over several months to ensure it was developing suitable egregiousness. At some point along the way, it picked up some interesting oxidation, turning an alarming Aperol orange.

The finished product retains that orange hue (which really is more egregious than I could have hoped) along with some nutty, oxidative notes. But it also smells and tastes surprisingly pleasant. If I didn’t know it was supposed to be a straightforward white wine, I might think I was drinking an interesting amber skin-contact natural thing, like probably aged in an amphora in Georgia. It is weird though. Daytona’s “ain’t me drinking that shit up” will probably be a common reaction. It seemed so apt, in fact, that I put it on the label.