The Roaring Twenties: February 2020 Book + Bottle Pairing
Fun Fact: In the 1920s champagne was served in champagne coupes like these! The fluted champagne glass didn’t become popular until the 1970s. Now, the trend is to use regular white wine glasses for sparkling wine to allow for greater appreciation of the wine’s aromas.
Most of us have read The Great Gatsby - maybe in high school or perhaps more recently. We’ve dreamed of the fancy dresses, dapper outfits, late night parties, and the nonchalant luxury of the the roaring twenties. Well, baby, it’s the roaring twenties again. So, to celebrate the twenties, we thought we’d pick some F. Scott Fitzgerald and transport ourselves back to the last century when everything glittered! I knew I wanted to branch out from the classic Gatsby and try something new, and as I was browsing the titles one in particular just spoke to me: This Side of Paradise.
As you know, Book + Bottle has been a long time coming. For many months now, I’ve felt that the next thing (the lease, the building permits, breaking ground, opening day) is imminent, right around the corner. We’ve made huge progress but it still feels like a slow slog. The progress on the store feels like a coming of age story: I’m the young (well, young enough!) protagonist bringing my dream into maturity, fighting trials and tribulations along the way. The German word for this type of coming of age novel is Bildungsroman, which literally means “formation novel.” Now if that isn’t the perfect metaphor…
I know, because I’m behind the scenes, that Book + Bottle is going to be paradise for all you book and wine lovers. And right now, we’re just right on the other side of it, looking in.
THE BOOK
Turns out, This Side of Paradise is also a Bildungsroman. In it, handsome Amory Blaine grows up amongst wealth and privilege, attending prep school at St. Regis and college at Princeton. He wants for nothing except for approval and distinction in the world. The first few chapters read almost like Gossip Girl with children play acting as adults. What’s so particularly recognizable in Amory’s character is his millennial expectation of greatness but insecurity in how to achieve it. He works toward self-improvement throughout the novel - taking up football for sport and reading literature to expand his mind. After he enlists in the army at the outbreak of the first World War, his beloved mother passes away and the family loses its fortune, leaving Amory to build his character and pocketbook in a new way. In this stage of his young life, he faces actual tribulations of failed romances, the loss of loved ones, a struggling career, and a general cynicism about the world around him. Amory navigates this period with self-destruction and small graces, eventually emerging a bit more hopeful and much more of an adult. He is “formed” you could say.
The name This Side of Paradise comes from a poem by another writer known for his good looks, Rupert Brooke, entitled “Tiare Tahiti,” (see below) with the line “Well this side of Paradise!… There's little comfort in the wise” which forms one of two epithets in the book. This sums up the theme of the novel: on the path to the perfection of heaven, the slog of life on earth can be very hard. This disillusionment is not unique to the 1920s. How curious that one hundred years later, we see youth struggling with the same idealism and disappointment of an age gone by. It’s almost a character study of the “entitled millennial”: Amory Blaine is unlikable at the beginning of the story - spoiled, entitled, and lazy. Yet, throughout the course of the novel, we begin to grow more fond of Amory and identify with his aspirations and efforts to be worthy. Fitzgerald narrates the book in an almost a self-absorbed sort of way where we get to participate in Amory’s development into a more complex, interesting, and redeemable character. There couldn’t be a more relevant time to read this book.
I love it, too, because of the focus on literature - Amory reads many of the greats of the time, and the name dropping almost serves as an education of sorts of the liberal arts of that time. Fortunately, someone has compiled a bibliography of the books referenced in This Side of Paradise if you want to read what Amory read on his path toward greatness.
What’s endearing about the history of this novel is why Fitzgerald wrote it: Fitzgerald had fallen in love with a beautiful, wealthy woman by the name of Zelda. After a brief affair, she broke off their relationship, and Fitzgerald thought getting published was the only thing that would bring her back. That set a fire under his toes and This Side of Paradise was published in 1920. It worked - the book wooed Zelda - and they married that same year. To honor this underlying purpose of the novel, we’ve chosen Iron Horse’s Wedding Cuvée to pair with the book.
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”
THE WINE
It may be cliché to do bubbles with Fitzgerald, but there are too many reasons that the Iron Horse Wedding Cuvée is the perfect pairing to ignore it. Like the Fitzgeralds’ marriage, prohibition also started in 1920, and that decade produced some of the classic “prohibition era” cocktails that remain classics today, like the Old Fashioned or Gin Fizz. And, if people weren’t drinking cocktails, then they were drinking champagne, as it was the drink of the rich and famous. Real champagne was hard to come by, so it really represented the affluence one had to possess to have access to the drink. Bubbles are celebratory and great for parties, and if you lived in New York City during the Jazz Age, as Amory does for a spell, you were sure to be sipping bubbles. Champagne fueled the late night, indulgent parties that Amory attended in both Princeton and New York. This era was all about luxury, indulgence, and ease, and bubbles fit the bill perfectly. Yet, Fitzgerald is American through and through, so we’ve picked an American bottle of bubbles to showcase the uniqueness of the States in the 20s.
However, you can’t party forever, and eventually prohibition and austerity seeped into American Culture. It wasn’t until 1933 that Prohibition ended in the US, and it took over 30 years to really get the American wine industry going again. But once it did, it quickly began to make its mark.
A view from the top of the hill at Iron Horse Winery in Sebastopol, California.
Iron Horse Winery is located in Sebastopol, California near Sonoma, at the top of a brilliant little hill overlooking the rolling vineyards. Founded in 1976, the winery has become renowned for making high quality American sparkling wine. It was served at the historic Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Meetings that helped to end the Cold War, and has been served through six consecutive White House Administrations since. This marked a turning point in American wine history, when our government recognized that American wine could be excellent and it made a statement to serve American wine at these international political meetings. Iron Horse is a family-owned winery, and when the founders’ daughter Joy Sterling was married, they made a wine they called the Wedding Cuvée in honor of the event. It was so delicious and so popular that they release it almost every spring, and this is the one we’re enjoying today alongside This Side of Paradise. Joy Sterling is now the CEO of the winery and author of several indulgent books about living on a winery.
“Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”
In addition to being bubbles and being American, the Iron Horse Wedding Cuvée is also pink! F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that alcohol was the rose colored glasses of life and this rose colored wine certainly makes life even better. With a beautiful rosy peach color, this wine exudes the sophistication and elegance that Amory aspired to and at some points achieved. A little exotic, even, with notes of mandarin orange peel and nutmeg, the wine is smooth and tingly on the palate and balanced in its approach. It’s romantic and sensual, but also fitting for a celebration.
Now here’s the cherry on the top of this perfect pairing: the winery’s own tasting notes for this release of the Wedding Cuvée describe a hint of “Tahitian lime,” which ties in beautifully to the poem below, “Tiare Tahiti”, which was Fitzgerald’s inspiration for This Side of Paradise. Cheers!
Tiare Tahiti
Mamua, when our laughter ends,
And hearts and bodies, brown as white,
Are dust about the doors of friends,
Or scent ablowing down the night,
Then, oh! then, the wise agree,
Comes our immortality.
Mamua, there waits a land
Hard for us to understand.
Out of time, beyond the sun,
All are one in Paradise,
You and Pupure are one,
And Taü, and the ungainly wise.
There the Eternals are, and there
The Good, the Lovely, and the True,
And Types, whose earthly copies were
The foolish broken things we knew;
There is the Face, whose ghosts we are;
The real, the never-setting Star;
And the Flower, of which we love
Faint and fading shadows here;
Never a tear, but only Grief;
Dance, but not the limbs that move;
Songs in Song shall disappear;
Instead of lovers, Love shall be;
For hearts, Immutability;
And there, on the Ideal Reef,
Thunders the Everlasting Sea!
And my laughter, and my pain,
Shall home to the Eternal Brain.
And all lovely things, they say,
Meet in Loveliness again;
Miri’s laugh, Teïpo’s feet,
And the hands of Matua,
Stars and sunlight there shall meet
Coral’s hues and rainbows there,
And Teüra’s braided hair;
And with the starred tiare’s white,
And white birds in the dark ravine,
And flamboyants ablaze at night,
And jewels, and evening’s after-green,
And dawns of pearl and gold and red,
Mamua, your lovelier head!
And there’ll no more be one who dreams
Under the ferns, of crumbling stuff,
Eyes of illusion, mouth that seems,
All time-entangled human love.
And you’ll no longer swing and sway
Divinely down the scented shade,
Where feet to Ambulation fade,
And moons are lost in endless Day.
How shall we wind these wreaths of ours,
Where there are neither heads nor flowers?
Oh, Heaven’s Heaven!—but we’ll be missing
The palms, and sunlight, and the south;
And there’s an end, I think, of kissing,
When our mouths are one with Mouth....
Taü here, Mamua,
Crown the hair, and come away!
Hear the calling of the moon,
And the whispering scents that stray
About the idle warm lagoon.
Hasten, hand in human hand,
Down the dark, the flowered way,
Along the whiteness of the sand,
And in the water’s soft caress,
Wash the mind of foolishness,
Mamua, until the day.
Spend the glittering moonlight there
Pursuing down the soundless deep
Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair,
Or floating lazy, half-asleep.
Dive and double and follow after,
Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,
With lips that fade, and human laughter
And faces individual,
Well this side of Paradise! ....
There’s little comfort in the wise.