Category: Wine
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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…
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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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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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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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Dom Pérignon
We have, I suppose, a bit of a conspicuous consumption problem around here sometimes. Pynchon’s drinks may more than occasionally point to the capitalistic excess of the drinker. If we find Scarsdale Vibe guzzling Pommery, we might be best not to take that as an authorial endorsement of the Champagne house. In other instances, the…
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Jurançon White
A bit over a year ago, I was in lockdown drinking a very tasty German white wine from Gravity’s Rainbow. In 2021, things are looking totally different, where by totally different I mean exactly the same except the wine is French and the book is Against the Day. This year’s lockdown white is the 2017…
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Lafite Rothschild
Well so I got bored of joking that someone should buy me a Lafite Rothschild bottle and just went and did it myself. Let’s not dwell too long on the fact that it maybe cost more than every other wine I’ve drunk here put together. It’s our ninety-ninth bottle pulled from the Pynchon cabinet: we…
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Watered pink wine
Perhaps after a weekend of global celebration following the Americans’ step back toward sanity, I’m not the only one who could use some gentle Monday hair of the dog? My glass is half wine half water and I make no apology. If Pynchon is to be believed, the key constituencies for watered-down wine, other than…
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 