Bones of the Dead: October 2020 Book + Bottle Pairing
October screams spooky, haunted, scary, and thrilling. Mystery and dread. Dead things and nightmares. What’s your worst nightmare? What makes your skin crawl and your blood boil? For some, it’s creatures of the eight legged variety, men in hockey masks, things that go bump in the night, blood and guts, or zombies jumping out of dark corners. For Janina Duszejko, it’s the hunters murdering innocent animals in her hamlet, not the dead bodies of those hunters that keep mysteriously appearing, that keeps her up at night. This might not be the scariest book you’ve ever read - it’s no thriller - but it’s a mystery for sure, and one that leaves you uncomfortable as the caper isn’t ever truly solved. We picked the book Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead because it’s a highly literary version of a murder mystery, perfect to get you in the mood for a creepy Halloween. And we’ve got a bloody wine to pair with it.
THE BOOK
Janina Duszejko is an older woman who lives alone in a small town on the Czech/Poland border. She cares for her neighbors second homes and helps when their cars get stuck in the snow. She gives her neighbors silly nicknames, too. And then one night, “Oddball” comes over to tell her that “Big Foot” is dead. This is the first in a string of deaths that may or not be murders, and may or may not be murders facilitated by victimized animals as retribution towards the hunters who killed them.
The book reads like traditional literary fiction — it’s more about the language and the art than a faced paced plot — the murders creep up on you. The narrator, Janina, is a questionable source — she’s into astrology and is always calculating peoples’ futures based on their birthdays and the ways that the stars are aligned. She starts to believe that the animals are murdering the humans, and we, because we have come to like her so much, start to agree that this might, in fact, be the case.
What’s beautiful about this book is the writing and the ambiguity. The author, Olga Tokarczuk, weaves feminism and animal rights throughout the book, juxtaposing subtle questions like why the killing of humans is murder whereas the killing of animals is sport. Her critique of machismo culture raised some eyebrows in her native Poland, but she’s pushing the envelope of feminism and animal rights at a moment in time that it seems poignant and extra important.
“Do what you will this life’s a fiction,
And is made up of contradiction.”
To summarize the book, I’m sorry to say I couldn’t say it better myself, so I’d like to quote The Guardian’s review, “[This book] is an astonishing amalgam of thriller, comedy and political treatise, written by a woman who combines an extraordinary intellect with an anarchic sensibility.” It’s serious stuff, and it’s seriously good.
THE WINE
To pair with this book, we’ve selected a wine that Janina could be proud of. She spent her life trying to product the wild animals around her and defending the “young ladies” of the forest (= deer). This wine is therefore vegan — no animals were harmed in the making of this wine.
You might be asking yourself if this is a gimmick - isn’t all wine vegan? It’s grapes! Actually, winemaking is quite a process and part of that process often includes fining the wine. Fining is the step that removes unwanted particles from the wine before it gets bottled and sold to consumers. It’s a chemical process by which something is added to the wine which bonds to certain molecules in the wine, and then these larger and heavier chain molecules fall out of the wine leaving the finished product clearer and more stable. Some winemakers don’t fine their wines, wanting to keep all of the flavor molecules present. Other winemakers prefer a crystal clear, clean wine that has less likelihood of spoilage. Then, they’d choose to fine their wines, often with animal-protein-based products like eggs or milk because these types of substances offer the right shape to bond with the undesirable molecules.
However, because of people like Janina championing animal rights, there’s now a movement toward vegan fining agents so that winemaker’s can have the best of both worlds — a crystal clear wine and zero animal products used in their wines. Some vegan fining agents include carbon, clay, limestone, silica gel, and more. This month’s wine, Avignonesi’s Vino Nobile Di Montepulciano, is fined with vegan substrates, aligning it with William Blake and Janina Duszejko’s sentiments on animal products for consumption.
“all wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap”
In addition to being vegan, this wine is also 100 % sangiovese. There’s a quick, cute story regarding the name of the grape — the common understanding of the name sangiovese derives from the Latin sangius jovis which means “blood of Jupiter.” The bloodiness of this story makes it perfect for October, Halloween, and a murder mystery. While it turns out that this probably isn’t true etymologically, it’s common “knowledge” and a good story.
So, I said earlier that this wine is a sangiovese, but on the label it says Vino Nobile Di Montepulciano. What gives? Many grapes have loads of synonyms which serves two purposes — to indicate a particular area a grape came from (i.e. Tinto Fino is what they call tempranillo from Ribera Del Duero in Spain), and to confuse the public. Just kidding, but it sure feels that way! Sangiovese goes by many names — it can be Chianti, Vino Nobile Di Montepulciano, Brunello, Rosso di Montalcino, and so on. Vino Nobile Di Montepulciano means the noble grape of Montepulciano (the town) — the noble grape being sangiovese. This is NOT to be confused with the montepulciano grape which is a different grape entirely and is from the east coast of Italy.
This wine is a house favorite, and you can read Susan’s full review of the wine here. It’s a medium bodied red wine that would go great with many types of food. Personally I would do a bolognese pasta on one of these cool evenings we surely have coming up. The herbaceousness of this particular wine will pick up any herbs in your pasta sauce, and sangiovese is a classic pairing with tomato sauces because of the herbal notes and acidity of the wine. With red cherry aromas and a pleasant earthiness, this wine would also be very lovely drinking all on its own, as well. Hope you enjoy!