Tag: France
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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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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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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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Banana Breakfast
This one’s been percolating in the back of my head pretty much since day one of the project. Parts of it have been bubbling away in the actual physical world since late 2019, creeping toward readiness. The time has come. From Mrs Quoad and her Disgusting English Candy Drill for drink ninety-nine, on to crest…
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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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French Beer
French stuff gets a good run around here. Usually wine, occasionally brandy, now and then absinthe. Never before a French beer though. Beer doesn’t really register on the Franco-radar. According to this book Farmhouse Ales I happen to have sitting on my shelf though, the French have a “little known tradition of beer appreciation” and…
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Pouilly-Fuissé
My sister described this Louis Jadot 2015 Pouilly-Fuissé as tasting of peach followed by buttery toasted pastry. Her palate must have developed some since last year’s bottle of Graves, where she managed “fruity.” This wine, a Burgundy chardonnay, comes to us from not only the same book as the Graves, but the very same sentence.…
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Pommery (Merry Christmas!)
Merry Christmas, Pynchondom! I hope you’re enjoying it with good friends and family and that your relatives’ paranoid conspiracy theories are at least entertaining. Here, we’ve pulled a festive bottle of Pommery Champagne from Against the Day to celebrate. The company is more sinister there — Foley Walker and Scarsdale Vibe drink some after Vibe…
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 