Readers + Drinkers Circle Winter 2022
In honor of the new year, our winter 2022 theme is inspiration. As we plan our intentions for the coming year, I want to fill our heads and our bellies with the words and juice of those living life to the fullest, overcoming obstacles to become their best selves, and inspiring those around them with their kindness, their intelligence, their diligence, and their grit. You'll find this theme loosely woven throughout the three pairings this quarter, and it will help us facilitate our end of the quarter discussion.
Family Medicine
Whether you get one, two, or three books a quarter, you'll be receiving Yaa Gyasi's second novel, Transcendent Kingdom. After her debut novel Homegoing earned her a seven figure advance and several prestigious book awards, her second book made it onto seventeen lists of best books of 2020. Now that is inspirational!
Transcendent Kingdom focuses precisely on a family, where the main character studies reward-seeking behavior in a neuroscience lab, while around her, her family crumbles. The topics are heavy, but the book shines with personality and intensity.
Gyasi's own writing inspiration came from reading Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and from winning a Reading Rainbow award for young writers as a child. She's now inspiring others with her own gifted writing, which I hope you enjoy.
From one ambitious, inspiring woman to another, we're pairing this book with a malbec from Laura Catena's personal winery project, Luca. Dr. Laura Catena is a fourth generation Argentine vintner, physician, and author. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, has a Medical Doctor degree from Stanford University, and has since joined her father Nicolás Catena Zapata at the family winery and founded the Catena Institute of Wine with the vision of making Argentine wines that could stand with the best of the world. That's a lot of accolades! Luca is Laura's own personal winery project named after her son and she makes good on the intention of making Argentinian wine the best in the world.
Inspired by Friendship
Our second book for the quarter is a cute story about two unlikely friends whose ages add up to a special number:The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin The characters' friendship develops in a hospital ward where the two could be suffering but instead choose to live the rest of their lives to the fullest.
Paired with this, we've got another red wine that was born out of deep compassion and friendship. Brooks Winery is the living legacy of Jimi Brooks, the namesake and original winemaker who died during a harvest. His wife, traumatized with the loss of her husband couldn't bear losing the harvest, too, and the nearby winery community banded together to finish the harvest and make Jimi's final vintage. The wine in this month's pairing, Runaway Red, was named because a barrel of the very first vintage of it came loose from a trailer and rolled down a hill. The next day the barrel was rescued and a friend had written “runaway red” on the barrel as a joke. The name stuck, the wine was good, and this helped launched Jimi's pinot noir project and career at Brooks.
Creamy Comfort
Matt Haig's The Midnight Library has been on all the lists this past year and I felt like many may have already read it. So, for Book Three of the quarter I chose his other recent book, The Comfort Book, as a perfect pick for anyone in search of hope, looking for a path to a more meaningful life, or in need of a little encouragement. In other words - inspiration.
To pair, we picked a nice comforting, creamy wine - this time a white - that, just like book three, is a little off mainstream. You may have heard of Tempranillo, but did you know that there's a mutation of Tempranillo that's white? Ontañon's Tempranillo Blanco is tropical, floral, crisp, and creamy from time spent on its lees. You haven't had anything like this, but give it a try and I think you'll be inspired to venture out into more unknown territory this year.