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Mamajuana
Mamajuana at last! More than a decade in the uncorking, but its fumes were in the air right from the beginning of this Drunk Pynchon goose chase. Bleeding Edge was the original inspiration here, with the hollows in its DeepArcher crawlers’ webs sheltering obscure booze of various tantalising species, eminently googleable although often not so…
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Watered Moselle
Here’s a nice quick sensible weeknight Pynchon-in-Public happy-birthday-Thomas drink! Watered Moselle pops up towards the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, a wind-down drink as the wheels fly off and Slothrop dissipates into the polluted aether, or a last optimistic sip to lend us a little courage for the fight ahead. We find ourselves, between these rocket…
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Grappa
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…
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Homemade Cider
The first fully homemade Tom Pynchon’s Liquor Cabinet signature artisanal homebrand alcohol featured here was beer, way back in 2016. It was six years before the next product of my fermentation cellar emerged, with 2022’s homemade wine. Now, in a portent of the fearsome acceleration and diversification of my amateur fermentation, we have two new…
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Homemade Sake
Back at the start of 2019, we drank some commercial sake here alongside the beautiful volumes of the Japanese edition of Gravity’s Rainbow, translated by Yoshiaki Koshikawa. I had realised too late that the sake under the Rainbow was actually homemade, and therefore an entirely different beast. We discussed a brief sake appearance in Vineland…
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Pinot E-Grigio
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…
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California Champagne
This post is the final in our Against the Day-Latin American adventure series (see Pulque, Chilean Riesling, Orizaba Beer, and Pox & Comiteco for previous installments). California, I realise, does not qualify as Latin American, but we headed back home to the antipodes via San Francisco, so the Golden State is getting lumped in. Late…
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Gentian Brandy in Tea
Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 251. I am pleased to inform you all I have meditated on Lt .Tyrone’s Third Proverb and concluded that “Ooh what’s this they’re drinking then?” is in fact exactly the right question.…
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Broglio
Chapter seven of V. opens with some very fancy dentistry, as New York dentist Dudley Eigenvalue admires his treasured set of dentures, “each tooth a different precious metal”. Not too many pages later, we’re in front of a wine shop on the Ponte Vecchio, Florence, with a gem of a bottle. Signor Mantissa is on…
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Hot Sake chased with Iced Champagne
As you may have read, I recently threw a party for the tenth anniversary of our bookish boozing here. No Tupperware was sold, but a fondue did get a little over-kirsched. Don’t be thinking that was our only Pynchonian drinking though! Guests were plied with a possibly excessive array of drinks, more or less entirely…
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