I wrote a wine list! And not just, like, for fun: it was work, or rather, "work." Work goes in the quotes there because it was really, barely work, as what I know work to be- it was definitely the most fun I've ever had doing something someone was paying me to do. I really want to figure out a way to swing "only writing wine lists" as being my job- I don't want to be a sommelier, since sommeliers have to polish glasses, and I ain't got time for that. I just want to swoop into every restaurant in the world, write them a magnificent wine list, and then swoop out as quick as I came, never to be seen again. Is that a thing? Can I make that a thing? I want to be that, and then also be "Kanye West's personal wine consultant," and "a novelist who lives on a vineyard." Let me know if you have any suggestions for how I can turn these dreams into a reality AKA do you know Kanye? Please tell Kanye about me.
I suppose that "writing an actual wine list for a functioning, operating restaurant" is a good first step on the road to becoming Yeezy's swoopy wine guru. It's a really sick wine list, but it's also very functional, and only about 3% self-indulgent. Too many wine lists in this world are just a big chaotic mess of some crackpot sommelier jerking himself off. Nobody wants your weird wine that tastes like basement, loser! I'm the people's sommelier. You can't ask every single person in the world to care deeply about wine, or even care at all; I want the people to have chill, delicious wines that taste like fruit and get them drunky drunk, and then they can try out the weirder, cooler shit if they're balling harder than usual or feeling a little experimental that day. I judge the excellence of a given wine list by the quality of their house white and red. It's about a billion times harder to find a solid, good value house wine then it is to curate a list of sexy and expensive stunnas.
No disrespect to sexy and expensive stunnas, though! When I started working on my list I had a vision of what I wanted my sexiest, most expensive stunna to be, and then I found it: it's my Vouvray. My Vouvray is called "Cuvee Pere Lucien," which means "My Dad Lucien's Cuvee," which is cool. Lucien is such a good name for a dad who you named your Vouvray after. Lucien's Vouvray tastes like honey, straw, macadamia nuts, chantilly cream, steel, and flowers; according to the Internet, it also tastes like quinces, but I have my doubts about that. Anytime a tasting note says a wine tastes like quinces, I'm like "Shut this down, you're making shit up." Nothing tastes like quinces. Quinces taste like nothing.
Last week, I had a bottle of my Vouvray that I took home from a wine tasting and every night I'd get home from work and pour myself a generous, restorative glass of it, which I would then proceed to drink "with great ceremony." There is no wine in the world more expressly tailored to my palate than my Vouvray, and I have decided that I am going to start buying my Vouvray by the case (I get to buy my wine at cost now BITCHES), so that I can drink a restorative glass of Vouvray every night of my life. I know there are people in the world who would argue against drinking your favourite wine in the world every single night of your life, but I'm really not afraid of "ruining" Vouvray for myself; worst case scenario, I'll get a little bit sick of the Vouv, switch over to exclusively drinking my second-favourite wine in the world (a white Burgundy, no doubt) for a couple months, then get back on the ole Pere Lucien once my palate has been effectively cleansed. You just can't live your life sitting around drinking crap wine when the Vouvray of your dreams exists and is accessible to you. What if you died in the middle of drinking a crap glass of wine? You'd be filled with regret! If you died in the middle of drinking a glass of Vouvray, you'd die happy. Or I would, at least.
LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Gregg Araki's New Short Film, A Glass of Champagne with a Shot of Chambord
And these are my other Things of the Week:
-On Sunday my friends and I saw Magic Mike in the special part of Arclight where they let you drink in the theater. I got one of the cocktails made especially for the movie, a glass of champagne with a shot of Chambord. It was called The Main Event, and there was nothing transcendent about drinking it, but I appreciate the poetry of "glass of champagne with a shot of Chambord" and also of mixing champagne with a liqueur made of raspberries and vanilla and cognac. Whoever thought that up is a sweetie pie and very much attuned to the spirit of Magic Mike and its big cute heart.
-This is actually a Thing of a Few Weeks Ago, but look at the wine I drank on the Island Queen ferry from Cape Cod to Martha's Vineyard last month:
-Last night I went to see Morris Day & The Time at Santa Monica Pier. After Magic Mike, it was the second most outrageously joyful thing I experienced this week. At one point between songs Morris explained how if you take a bottle of champagne from the fridge and set it out on a hot day, the moisture on the bottle will start to condensate, because that's what happens when you're cool from the inside out: you condensate, not sweat. Later on when Shaz and I were waiting for the valet at Loews Hotel, Morris Day walked past us in his sparkly suit, drinking a can of soda, accompanied by a hot woman and a little kid whom he addressed as "buddy." I don't know, it was just really nice for me to hear Morris Day call a little kid "buddy"; it was sweet and made me feel like the world's a sweet place. On the way home I got weirdly lost and ended up in Bel Air and then in the tunnel in Less Than Zero where Blair hits the coyote. I also drove through the Valley, Griffith Park, Venice, West L.A., downtown, other places, and got home and reread the coyote part of Less Than Zero, which I'd underlined for teenage reasons I don't remember:
Probably I just liked how L.A. sounded tragic and evil. L.A. is absolutely tragic and evil, but it's also not, it's nine million different things and I love how there's no way I could ever get to know all of them.
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