Reading Between the Wines

What if your entire life’s circumstances pushed against society’s norms and you found yourself willingly becoming a wife one day a week while other women took turns with your husband on other nights? This is the situation Thursday finds herself in with Seth- her given name is also her day as Seth’s wife: Thursday. She talks about Monday and Tuesday as unnamed characters in this plot until she finds a way to meet them by stalking Hanna (Monday) and Regina (Tuesday). When Thursday meets Regina, she meets her match. When mental illness and naked revenge meet, things unravel spectacularly. Your head may spin from all the twists and turns…Quick! pour yourself a lovely glass of 2019 Castelfeder Pinot Grigio from Alto Adige, Italy. The label may be boring but the wine is complex, much like the plot of this novel! With aromas of pears & saline, this wine has apple, pear, and citrus notes, with a slightly bitter finish. Bitterness pairs with Regina’s ploys perfectly.

Widow Astrid Strick and her adult children Elliot, Porter and Nicky figure out together how to grow into who they are while living in the fish bowl of a small town. When Astrid sees Barbara Baker get fatally hit by a school bus, she still carries the anger and shame of a secret (or lie) Barbara told years ago about her son kissing a boy. See the Stricks navigate single parenthood, infidelity, social climbing and adolescent troublemaking as they discover how to be a family. As the town is faced with August, a friend of Nicky’s daughter Cece, literally parading down the street as his alter-ego Robin in a dress, it opens the door for other characters to own who they truly are. This includes the shocking discovery of Birdie and Astrid’s relationship. It may take more than the bottle of wine Birdie brings to a Strick family dinner to sort all this drama out!

Since we are on the subject of wine as a gift, we are cracking open a lovely bottle for sharing; a 2016 Pinot Noir Cuvee de Trois from Joseph Swan with notes of cherry, dark berries, delicate flowers and cola, of all things. If you are looking for a gift, don’t be embarrassed by judging a wine by its cover… labels are often the deciding factor in a wine purchase. Choose a popular pour like Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, Malbec, Riesling or Syrah with a winning label in your price range, and you are off to the races! If you are looking to say ‘thank you’ to your host, you can’t go wrong with bubbles… chilled champagne, anyone?

Have you ever wanted a do-over on your life choices? We meet Nora on one of the worst days of her life as she goes to see her childhood librarian, Mrs. Elm, who introduces her to the midnight library where each book contains the life she could have lived if she had made different decisions. Nora doesn’t just read about these lives, she actually lives them until she finds they are wrong for her and she returns to the midnight library with Mrs. Elm. Go along for the ride as she cliff jumps, becomes a celebrity, dates a celebrity, battles a polar bear, becomes a Philosophy professor, wife and mother and runs the Buena Vista Winery with Eduardo. Along the way Nora meets Hugo, who is also a ‘slider’, which means he slides from life to life exploring all the versions of himself he could have been and he helps her understand what is happening and how to navigate it. We discover with Nora and Hugo that our choices change everything and that things we think are all about us (our regrets, our failings) are usually not ours to carry at all. Things often turn out just how they are supposed to. Since the Buena Vista Winery, which Nora runs with Eduardo in one of her lives, grows Syrah in reality, today we are sipping a J.L. Chave, a Northern Rhone Syrah from the Saint Joseph region of France which has been making this variety since 1481. This full-bodied red wine has notes of black fruit, bacon fat, violets, black tea and leather, and it pairs well with BBQ, ribs and lamb. Had Nora chosen to stay at Buena Vista, she certainly would have discovered this pairing.

Imagine being celebrated at an award ceremony at a California winery and having your mom and your boyfriend not show up, only to find out they both died in a plane crash on their way. This is the plight of Natalie Harper, who inherits both her mom’s run-down bookshop and care of her grandfather as a result of the tragedy. It seems all is lost, but the shop’s handyman Pete ‘Peach’ Galloway and his daughter Dorothy keep finding solutions...like Dorothy’s favorite author Trevor Dashwood, who always looks for the flip side in any tough situation, coming to do a book signing in the quaint little shop. The characters all find their way from grieving to thriving along the way to saving the shop. The wine we chose to pair with this lovely story is a 2018 Old Vine Zinfandel from Bedrock Wine Company, as it has notes of ‘Peach’, violets and cherries. This company has another thing in common with the story, they rehabilitated old California vineyards and processes much as Natalie started in a California vineyard before bringing the bookshop back to life.  Learn how grape juice becomes wine, the difference between how yeast and bacteria interact with wine, what viticulture and terroir have to do with your favorite sip and how zinfandel can be both a red and white wine.

When Alice married into the Van Cleave family, an Appalachian coal mining dynasty, and moved to Baileysville, KY from England she had no idea she would become a Packhorse Librarian. The 1930s were a tough time to be a woman in America and living in the hills and hollers didn’t make it any easier. Marjorie, Izzy, Sophia and Beth; these are the friends that spread books and hope to their rural communities while fighting injustice and abuse themselves. Based on real historical events, you’ll be rooting for these ladies to overcome their circumstances and triumph together as women. A quote from the book informs our tasting today: “Bordeaux bottles are sturdy like wives, while Burgundy bottles are curvaceous like their mistresses.” Learn why bottles have such different shapes and discover an Alfred Merkelbach Auslese Riesling from the Rosenburg vineyard while you learn what punts, necks, shoulders, bodies, opacity, translucence and thickness have to do with how you enjoy your favorite wine.

This engaging thriller begins when brand-new parents Ann and Marco are invited next door to celebrate their next-door neighbor Graham’s birthday, keeping a baby monitor on to hear their sleeping child after their babysitter cancels. When baby Cora comes up missing, secrets come spilling out of a broadening cast of characters revealing that nothing is as it seems when voyeurism, adultery, childhood trauma, failing businesses and a kidnapping scheme are all unveiled. This whodunnit begins with a simple invitation to dinner, so we delve into what are the best wines to show up to a dinner party with. The short answer is that everything’s coming up bubbly! Whether you choose a traditional champagne, a prosecco, a cava or the sparkling vouvray we selected, Chateau Moncontour NV, you can’t go wrong pairing some part of the evening with bubbles. Learn the difference between these sparkling wines and select the perfect hostess gift for your next dinner party invite.

Who would have thought that a house showing on New Year’s Eve could end in such chaos? When a realtor, a bank president, a pregnant couple, a kindly old lady and a house-flipping duo end up in a hostage situation after a nearby bank robbery goes awry, detectives have a hard time figuring out exactly what happened and how the stories of these people intertwine. Some characters are hidden away in a closet (with red wine and a corkscrew) and demands are made for fireworks and pizza, so we have chosen to find the perfect red wine pairing for pizza! Surprise, surprise, it is, in fact Italian. From the soil created by the most active volcano in Europe, Mt. Etna, we have 2018 Tenuta delle Terre Nere Etna Rosso and much like our book’s characters, we find that struggling to survive makes grapes better and richer. In the book we learn that humor is the soul’s last line of defense; often natural cork from Portugal is wine’s last line of defense. Cin Cin!

Welcome to Crosby, Maine, home of Olive and Henry Kitteridge and all their neighbors who fill the pages of this collection of 13 short stories. Olive Kitteridge reads much like J.D. Salinger’s 9 Stories, where the point isn’t to weave these stories into a tapestry, but to see the threads that tie them loosely together. We get to spend a day in the lives of many Crosby residents dealing with infidelity, loyalty, petty grievances, suicide, life transitions and the thoughtfulness of a well-timed doughnut to pair with red wine. This last plot point brings us to our flight of doughnuts and wines to pair with the story. Just like the breadth of characters in this book, we have a variety of wines (Lambrusco, moscato, muscatel and Sauternes) and pastries (glazed doughnut, apple fritter, lemon cronut and chocolate frosted doughnut) to sample and pair. Listen in and make some pastry pairings of your own!

Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey, is the perfect book to shake off the stupor of our shared year of unexpected pivots. As we crawl out of this season, we are gathering strength to be brave and take the hill, and McConaughey is all about going all in, but he wants us to stop and ask, 'What’s your hill?' first. Greenlights are about going and doing the thing, but they are also about timing and fate. Hearing about the author's path and passion will surprise and motivate you to take on your next challenge with wit and wisdom. This week, we are pairing Greenlights with a lovely rosé, the 2020 Birichino Vin Gris. Birichino means naughty or impish, which makes it a perfect rom-com match, and the exploits of Matthew himself make this an ideal choice. Rosé is also fitting because as this book shows us, a short-term experience can alter who you are for the rest of your life; rosé begins with black grapes that change forever when they undergo a short maceration or a quick press to become pink juice. Go read this book and sip a rosé…it might just change you.

When Olivia moves from New York to L.A. to start her own law firm, she unwittingly embarks on a torte love affair with Senator Max Powell. Their shared love of dessert brings them together, but will his knowledge of her past tear them apart? We pair this cake driven story with a 2015 Quinta de la Rosa LBV Port, a lovely dessert wine created with good old-fashioned foot-treading and fortified to 19.5% alcohol with aguardente (fire water) brandy.