Tag: France
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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…
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Cognac
Cognac first appears in Pynchon crated up on the Swinemünde dock, among the cargo Gerhardt von Göll / Der Springer is shipping upriver. Springer’s cargo also features “six chorus girls, wearing feathers and spangles under old cloth coats to save trunk space, a small pit band at different levels of alcoholic slumber, manymany cases of…
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Graves
It is February and a little late for new year’s resolutions, but I will nevertheless assert that I’m hoping to pick up the pace around here this year. When I last checked, there were something like 403 drinks on the list. We’re not even a quarter through; this one-a-month pace is not going to cut…
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Montrachet
Early on in Gravity’s Rainbow, while we’re still huddled behind London blackout curtains with relatively recognisable characters and fairly coherent plots, Jessica sits up while Roger sleeps, “filling with a need to cry” because she cannot protect him as she wants to. She remembers asking him what things were like before the war. Page 59:…
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Cheap Claret
Claret first enters the etymological record as a British nickname for Bordeaux red in 1700, not too long before Mason & Dixon gets started. The slang would then have been sixty-some years in use when first appears in M&D on page 192, with Mason in an English pub called the George distracting himself from the death of former Astronomer Royal Bradley with…
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Mâconnais
“It’s like licking a bloody piece of slate tile” quoth my father post-quaff of this Mâconnais. He seemed to intend this as a compliment. The Mâconnais is a Southern chunk of the Burgundy wine region, known for producing value-for-money Chardonnay. This bottle (Louis Latour Les Deux Moulins Saint-Véran) did indeed seem reasonably cheap for fancy-sounding Burgundy under a a classy-looking label. Whether it…
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Absinthe Frappé
This here is the fiftieth drink to join our digital cabinet of liquors! And a mighty fine addition it is too. If I were asked elect an emblematic spirit for each Pynchon book, some choices would be easy. White corn whiskey would represent Mason & Dixon. Lot 49 might be kirsch. And Against the Day would be absinthe. The denizens of AtD take their absinthe in…
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 