White Rioja as Cultural Signifier
“One of my closest friends is such an oenophile that she has worn off on me and I comfortably pretend I know things about white Rioja even when I’m not with her.”
- from “Letting the chips fall,” a recent blog post written by Sloane Crosley for The New York Times‘ online series, Proof: Drinking and American Life.
Nice. Check out Ms. Crosley’s essay on how memory plays on our taste preferences, how a “bad drug or alcohol experience can be a taste-altering thing, like a tattoo if tattoos were assigned at random…We become engrained with our first grain.”
Her post is a bit meandering, but she casts a wide lasso into her past to explain her present palate, making her a woman after my own heart.
And in one of those odd coincidences, it just so happens that Ms. Crosley went to summer camp with my girlfriend, who last year added her worn copy of Ms. Crosley’s collection of essays, I was told there’d be cake, to a stack of books on my bedroom floor, which just last week I transferred to a larger ‘reading’ pile in my office, which is topped off as I write this by none other than the very book in question.