I Died: December Book + Bottle Pairing

I died when I read this book. It’s true. It was so funny, and so poignant, and so pertinent, that I simply died.

The expression it killed me that we used to use to mean something cracked you up or broke your heart has been brought agency - now you just die. You can die when experiencing something so great, or so horrible, or so embarrassing, that you just simply die there on the spot. Jenny Slate died several times in her book Little Weirds. She died from the pleasure of eating a sardine sandwich, she died of old age with an (ex) husband in a what -if-we-had-stayed-together future memory story, she died as as an old, sad vagina, and she died listening to a fellow who mansplained her right to death.

Jenny Slate‘s little stories are like listening to a great new soundtrack where you want to play the best track over and over and over again as you’re driving in your car because it gives you such good feels that you want to live within it as long as possible.

My favorite story was called Kathleen/ Dog-Flower-Face. I find the story to be perfect. You’ll need to read it yourself to see. In it, Jenny asks her landscaper, Kathleen, to put some blue flowers in her yard, and Kathleen tells her that her dog will want to smell them and they’ll stick to his face, “and I don’t know if you’ll like that.” Jenny says she would like that.

“What I didn’t tell her was that when she asked me that question about flowers on my dogs face, she showed me that a legitimate option for experience, a true one that is real and is deeply concerned with beauty, could be mine…do you or do you not want flowers that stick to a dog’s face. Yes or No… In making sure, Kathleen gave me the opportunity to say out loud to another person that ‘I would like my old dog to have flowers stuck to his face.”

The whimsy in the image of a flower-covered dog and the purity of Jenny realizing she has the choice to create delight in her own life (“I said who I was on my land”) make this little story both heartbreaking and heartmending simultaneously. I would like to listen to this story every morning to set the tone for my day.

Jenny Slate‘s chapter on what if‘s make you feel like a child again having that wondering every little thing that happens in the world and wondering why it happens and asking questions as if you were the first person to have ever had them before

Red Geraniums

Jenny Slate is wild and loves red geraniums. Geraniums pop up throughout her stories and symbolize the Wild Woman within her. There’s a New York Times Bestseller called Women Who Run with the Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes about reclaiming the inner wild one. I’m reading it right now, and I’d bet Jenny has read it, too. Like Little Weirds, it’s also full of stories and cultural tales that help women relate back to their ancient wisdom of power, intuition, creativity, and knowing. In Jenny’s story Geranium, it’s this flower that makes her aware of her inner wild woman and calls her back to her true self. These flowers are outdoor plants, as all plants originally were, but if you bring one inside, as a houseplant, it can still survive.

I am a wild thing, but I wanted a home. I am wild, and I wanted to be that and to belong to the greater group and have everyone know that my wildness is nothing but a bit of my colors and has nothing to do with whether or not I can be trusted. A geranium is a wild thing. It is so wild you can hardly kill it. But it does not take over your house if you put it inside.

It’s this sense of wildness, roses climbing a trellis, geraniums that can live inside a castle, little flowers on a dog’s face, sugar and spice and everything nice, that made us pair Little Weirds with this month’s wine.

THE WINE

Jenny is a little wild, and a little weird, and so is Gewurtztraminer. Gah - VERTZ - trah - meener. Gewurtz is a highly aromatic white wine from Germany and a few places in France and Italy. I even had a delicious Gewurtztraminer from Colorado once. Bad ones can be cloying and off-putting, reminiscent of your grandmother’s old closet after her overdone perfume bottle fell and cracked, and leaked into the dust. Great ones can be complex, exotic, and sensual with flavors of lychee, ginger, honey, and spice, and aromas of rose water, smoke, and…geranium. Too much geranium in a wine, like too much wildness in a person, can be considered a fault, but when it’s there in healthy moderation, it’s one of the things that makes Gewurtz, Gewurtz.

Flavors of Gewurtztraminer, Courtesy of Wine Folly

Gewurtztraminer was the first wine that really did it for me. I was making a nice dinner for my then boyfriend, and the fresh fall day called for pork tenderloin roasted with apples. A stop by my local wine store had me pairing the meal with a German wine I’d never tried before in a tall, skinny green bottle. It was perfection. That one was an Albert Boxler Gewurtztraminer, and it was divine.

This particular Gewurtztraminer, Zinck, is…..okay. The first sip was that dusty closet I was telling you about. Yuck. But once it coated my palate the following sips were actually nice. This one was floral with more fruit than spice. The fruity acidity made it taste a little a little sour on the finish, and there was a touch of sweetness. I sipped on this finishing Little Weirds in front of my mother’s Christmas tree, and it was perfectly fitting. The hint of spice was warming, the sweetness balanced out that sour acidity to keep it drinkable as I read, and the exotic lychee fruit and rose matched the special feeling of the season. And, the geranium essence made it feel a little wild, too.

I personally prefer Germany to Alsace (where this one was from), and sweet to dry, because the little bit of sugar helps bring out the alluring spice and flower notes. It also helps it pair better with food, in my opinion, especially with Indian or Moroccan dishes that are full of heat and spice. This particular wine cost $13 at ABC and it was fine, but I’d strongly recommend finding yourself a high quality German Gewurtztraminer (maybe $25) for the one or two times a year that you reach for this little, weird wine. In fact, I’m going to do just that myself.

A LITTLE HOLIDAY TREAT FOR YOU

Before I moved back home to St. Pete, I was living in Colorado. As soon as it got cold, you could find this magical drink called Glühwein everywhere. A nod to the Germans who came to Colorado to ski, Glühwein is a warm, spiced wine that goes down a little too easy when it’s snowing outside. While it might not be snowing here, we are getting some cold days, so this is the perfect thing to warm you up from the inside out. I’m going to make this for my neighborhood open house to share the warmth of the season with my friends and neighbors. This recipe comes from the St. Regis Hotel in Aspen Colorado. I hope you enjoy! Cheers!