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Taittinger
Here’s a quick one; I couldn’t let the month of fifty years since Gravity’s Rainbow‘s detonation into the world fly past uncelebrated! Back to the Casino Hermann Goering, just post the Veuve and the vulgar song, where Slothrop’s a bit out of it, his drunken dissolution presaging perhaps his later existential dissolution, and the waiters…
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California Chenin Blanc
Drinking Dos Equis back in 2018, I found myself pretty hazy on the narrative details of Vineland. The reread I prescribed myself then has unfortunately yet to occur. Hopefully 2023 is the year! Today’s relevant passage finds Weed Atman, who sounds more or less familiar, talking with someone called Rex, who is who knows who.…
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Ouzo
If the drinks dotted liberally through Against the Day represent a boozy symphony, ouzo appears as a major-key motif late in the piece. We first find Cyprian drinking it among “fair limbs and spring sunrises” in Salonica: “It was the absence of all hesitation here that impressed Cyprian, setting aside the ouzo and hashish whose…
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Chablis Punch
In the innocent days of late 2019, I ordered a box of wines of Pynchonian pedigree. We’ve since knocked off the Constantia, the Pouilly Fuisse, the Tignanello, and the Zeltinger. But the bottle of Chablis has had to bide its time. It was destined to become punch, and opportunities to break out the punch bowl…
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Homemade wine
I started making wine at the very beginning of covid lockdowns in Melbourne. On Good Friday 2020, in a transaction illegal under the newly implemented social distancing laws, I picked up four boxes of grapes from the back of a Hilux at a servo on the side of a highway. I spent the drive there…
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Málaga Mountain Wine
Chapter 12 of Mason & Dixon finds our beloved astronomers, along with the probably less beloved Maskelyne, on St Helena, a British island territory in the South Atlantic Ocean. They’re drinking at a “punch house” called the Moon, which I can only imagine they selected based on their attraction to heavenly bodies. The Moon appears…
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Corn Liquor
Right near the opening of Against the Day, the Chums have the Inconvenience parked at the Chicago World’s Fair. Dally Rideout (who we’ve shared several drinks with before) makes her precocious first appearance: “Pa!” An attractive little girl of four or five with flaming red hair was running toward them at high speed. “Say, Pa!…
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A Fifth of Jack Daniels
A rare visit to The Crying of Lot 49! The opening sentence’s too much kirsch in the fondue is probably the only booze to rival GR‘s banana mead for Pynchonian icon status, if only by appearing at the very very beginning of his most accessible work. Otherwise, though, there isn’t too much to drink in…
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151 and Pineapple Juice
Last week, we made burgers. Hailing as I do from the great state of Queensland, it was imperative I get a slice of tinned pineapple in there. Later in the week, another few slices made their way on top of a curry. Both applications were thoroughly delicious. (We will avoid the fraught question of pizza.)…
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Szekszárdi Vörös
We now make a final return to a paragraph we’ve visited twice before (first for Apricot Brandy in 2015, then Gewurtztraminer a year later). Yashmeen and Cyprian are fleeing some Hungarians, hiding out in Ratty’s safe house, inspecting the pantry. Here it is one last time: By the unwritten rules of these transitory dwellings, the…
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Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 