Amidst the festive chaos, I am cracking a bottle of Prosecco and making everyone tolerate me taking pictures of it atop a paperback of a Pynchon tome. It’s tradition! (See e.g. Pommery, Perrier Jouët, Piesporter, Pink Champagne) (Apparently, without ever consciously deciding to do so, I have curated a strictly P-initial sparkling canon. P for presents? For Pynchon?)

Prosecco pops up in contexts more and less festive across Against the Day. We first find it in the ice bucket of the Chums of Chance. Their two bottles are from “only a little north of here”, (p. 247), here at the time being Venice. When it next crops up, we’re a bit further out of town. Scarsdale Vibe and Foley Walker dine “at an outdoor restaurant in the foothills of the Dolomites”:

The table between them offering fontina, risotto with white truffles, veal and mushroom stew… bottles of Prosecco waiting in beds of chipped ice packed down from the Alps.

Against the Day, p. 724.

Outdoors in the Dolomites might not make for great Christmas lunching conditions climatically speaking, but otherwise that sounds like it would do the job nicely.

After our Dolomitic detour, it’s back down the hill to Venice again. Prosecco makes its last appearance at the Venice home of Prince and Princess Spongiatosta:

Servants brought cold prosecco and glasses on a silver antique tray, and Alexandrian cigarettes in a Byzantine box at least seven hundred years old.

Against the Day, 868.

Here’s hoping your work Secret Santa gets you a seven hundred year old Byzantine box. Have a wonderful Christmas all!