Category: Other spirits
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Santiago Rum
So we have a cover! In the unlikely event that this is news to you, please find the USA (left) and UK/Aus (right) covers for Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming novel Shadow Ticket attached below. Do you like them? I think I prefer the UK cover overall, although the diagonal text in the US version sets up…
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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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Too Much Kirsch in the Fondue
Last week, we celebrated ten years of Tom Pynchon’s Liquor Cabinet. Believe it or not, an entire decade of literary boozing has passed since that first bottle of Chivas Regal (V., p. 124). I threw a party for the occasion, and what centrepiece could have been more fitting than a fondue with Too Much Kirsch?…
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Pox & Comiteco
When I wrote the Pulque post a couple of months back, I was still polishing off an Against the Day reread that had carried me through the Americas. Little did I know, having just recently left Mexico, I was about to encounter a passage bearing a couple of the most specifically Mexican drinks in the…
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Cuervo Extra
Illness in the household sadly keeps me indoors this Pynchon in Public night. Normally it should go without saying I would be out flaunting posthorns and flashing bootleg “The Small Rain” editions on the streets, which streets I’ve no doubt this evening are thronged again with acolytes of our favourite postmodernist. Failing that though, we…
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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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Peach Brandy
Mason & Dixon has a few drinks that stuck out to me as defining when I first read it. White corn whisky and madeira top the pile, as I wrote about the day I finished the book. Peach brandy doesn’t get anything like the airtime those two command, but it has nevertheless always sung to…
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Italian Gin
We return now after an interregnum of two years to the Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Slothrop’s ode to his drunkard mate. Last time we came for the French beer, nowhere near as septic as our lieutenant would have it. Hopefully he’s misjudged Italian gin too. The Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick Oh Italian gin is a…
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Jamaican Rum
One Sunday evening mid-blitz, somewhere in Kent and just before Christmas, everyone’s favourite adulterers Jessica Swanlake and Roger Mexico come upon a church. England’s war-weary are trudging in to warm themselves with advent nostalgia. Roger’s rationalism softens a moment and he and Jessica head in too—“to hear the music,” he explains. Inside, a “scratch choir”…
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Šljivovica
A few years ago, an old work friend and mentor originally from Montenegro showed up at a party I threw with a very kind gift of a bottle of Serbian šljivovica. Maybe a year later, she brought another bottle to another party. I had a few other spirits laid out that night I wanted finished,…
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 