Category: Wine
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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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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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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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Chilean Riesling
You would think I could have taken care of this one years ago. But nary a drop of Chilean riesling has graced Australian shores in the years I’ve been looking. So it took a trip to Santiago. We had only a day in the Chilean capital, sandwiched between two weeks in Patagonia and a week…
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Merry Christmas! (Perrier Jouët)
Merry Christmas everybody! May your parties be as glamorous as R. Wiltshire Vibe’s (and not as evil): Palm trees grew everywhere, arecas, palmettos, Chinese fan-palms, ranging from squat greenhouse specimens in wicker-covered pots to twelve-foot foyer varieties to stately coconut and date trees rooted somewhere far below and soaring to these ballroom altitudes through openings…
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Canary Wine
Are we getting late in the game here? The list of empty bottles grows lengthy. But plenty remain uncracked too (even some low-hanging fruit—rum and coke!). And of course there is always the possibility of a new novel descending, pages humid with ethanol. Plus no one could accuse me of setting a cracking pace. This…
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White Bordeaux
Chapter 17 of Bleeding Edge finds Maxine at a disreputable tavern by the name of Junior’s Ooh-La Lounge sniffing out leads on Gabriel Ice and the fire at Shae and Bruno’s place. She meets Randy, a helpful fellow with a fondness for Shania Twain and a key to Ice’s front gate. They drive out to…
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 