In-between my drinking this grappa and my writing about it here, a wondrous new window opened in the world: we are getting a new Thomas Pynchon novel! I struggle to overstate my excitement at this tremendous, improbable news. It felt like—feels like—the Christmas of childhood.

No doubt you’ve read the blurb, clearly penned by the man himself. Shadow Ticket, due in October, brings us the tale of one Hicks McTaggart, private eye, on the trail of a missing Wisconsin cheese heiress. Hijinks, including of the Hungarian variety, ensue. We’ve touched on Hungary briefly here before, mostly through the contents of a cupboard abandoned by some Hungarians in Against the Day (see Szekszárdi Vörös, Apricot Brandy). Kit and Dally do spend some time in Hungary too, but they aren’t recorded as drinking anything especially Hungarian that I picked up on.

What liquid magyar delicacies could we expect from this forthcoming sojourn? In Budapest myself long ago, I drank a pretty challenging herbal apertif by the name of Zwack Unicum. It’s apparently been around since the 1790s, so could be a contender for an appearance. If Hicks’s lindy-hop is not sufficient to skip him back across the requisite span of spacetime, perhaps the interdimensional wallop of Zwack will help get him the rest of the way.

Speaking of traversing space and time, let’s set aside speculation on Hungarian novels future and get back to Italian grappas past. Against the Day, in its atlantean globetrotting, finds a good chunk of pages to spare hunkered down in northern Italy, grappa ground zero.

Our first taste comes when Cyprian is posted to Venice with Derek Theign:

They were soon cozily, all but domestically, established in a pensione in Santa Croce, within easy dash of the train station and the Mestre bridge, gathered at the moment at a kitchen table with a bottle of grappa and some peculiar biscuits.

Against the Day, p. 706.

Grappa recurs periodically throughout the Italian sections of the book, and all our key characters get around it. Kit and Dally drink it (p. 739), Reef and Yashmeen find some (p. 857), and Frank even wanders into a bar in Aguilar, Colorado full of Italian customers drinking “grappa and beer,” (p. 1011).

The grappa I have here is Negro Acquavite di Vinaccia—literally “pomace spirit,” as grappa is distilled from the grape skins and stems left over after winemaking. Unusually, it hails from Putignano in Puglia, in southern Italy, rather than the more typical grappa heartlands of the north. It opens with a complex aroma of orange, dark chocolate, raisins, plums, and almonds, and the palate follows through with notes of table grapes and more choc-orange, cut by a pleasant green, seedy-stemmy quality that gives it structure. It’s sweet and floral throughout. I drank it alongside a short espresso, in the classic Italian style, and the grappa’s gentle sweetness played off the coffee’s bitterness extremely nicely. The whole setup made me wish I were an older Italian gentleman with a street corner to perch on and a steady stream of passersby to pair with my daily grappa and espresso.

Or better yet: an older Italian gentleman with a grappa and an advance reading copy of Shadow Ticket! Less than six months to wait everybody…