“Night of a Thousand Wines” & Foal Orlean

Reading:
“Night of a Thousand Wines”

Let’s go back to July of this hellish year, to Friday the 17th when RBG announced her cancer recurrence and McEnany said that science shouldn’t stand in the way of schools reopening; to when, somewhere in the Hudson Valley of New York, a foal was being born, celebrated, and sunbaked sushi was being (rightfully) ignored. On this day of new reasons to drink heaped upon 2020’s old reasons our patron saint of pandemic drinking, Susan Orlean, ascended.

The barn smelled warm and milky. The mare obliged us by stepping to the back of her stall so we could see the foal, who was dark and leggy and as hoppy as a rabbit….At one point, he maneuvered his lips around my hand and tried to suckle. Damn, I thought. This colt is not even a day old and he has already learned about disappointment.

- “Night of a Thousand Wines”

Myself new to Twitter after beginning this cocktail blog, a friend (who is deeply familiar with Lit-Twit, one of the many undercurrent conversations whirling about the deluge of Twitter) suggested I create a cocktail to celebrate/honor/commiserate with Orlean. So, in the words of Orlean herself, “Such an invitation is, in my estimation, not to be ignored,” and I began the process of researching and thinking and—you guessed it—drinking. The bulk of the ascension’s when and how (a fittingly serious term for a saint) can be found on Medium, in Susan Orlean’s “Night of a Thousand Wines.” The why, I suspect, is as unexamined and universally shared as unmasked breathing once was, a twisting, buried splinter of disappointment that, in March and April, was brilliantly painful but has wound itself deeper and subsumed into a dull and constant ache we’ve learned to live with. You can learn to live with anything, it turns out, but it sucks. After all, what could we do about the lack of leadership at the state and federal level? What’s to be done about people who don’t believe in science or, worse, believe the wrong science? Everyone was trying—is trying—to keep it together because “living the dream” and waking to “another day in paradise” is the American way. But, for fuck’s sake, we were tired of it—are tired of it.

Then, in an answer to an unuttered prayer, she arrived in all her honest, brazen, rosé -drunk glory. We, too, wanted our comfort animal. We, too, were sad that we didn’t keep good candy at home. We, too, for the love of everything holy, were sick and tired of everything.

I want to be clear here that what the thousands of us who clicked that tweet’s little blue heart were identifying with wasn’t schadenfreude, we weren’t enjoying the drunken misery of Mrs. Orlean, or laughing at a performance. Instead, we were seeing in the world, in real time, the thing we felt we’ve wanted—needed­—as remedy for the truck loads of crap that 2020 has had no shortage of that we’ve put up with which had something to do with the dissolution of whatever it is that forces us to “hold it together.” Obligation or pride, internalized fidelity to “the system”—it was permission to let those things go. Unclench. Unwind.

Not, like, forever. Obligation is a good thing when focused on what is helpful and important, ditto pride and fidelity, but holding everything together for nine months during a pandemic is overly stressful. Shouldering work during the slow collapse of capitalism along with balancing home-life and those internal pressures is hard. And, you know, sometimes you just have to get wrecked so you can pick up the pieces and pull back together what’s important, and leave the crap behind. I think about it in a circular, life and death and rebirth sort of way: we self-annihilate so we can remake ourselves, so we can shake loose the flaws of stress and social detritus and willfully choose what to hold onto and what to let go of. (Yes, I am fun at parties.) And I think we needed permission to do that. We were happy to share in it, to enjoin it, to rally around something we could, finally, get behind in 2020, which was a reason to drink, and someone to drink with. Forget self-care, we needed a little self-destruction. We needed Susan Orlean, patron saint of pandemic drinking. Amen.

Cocktail: (Going) Foal Orlean

It’s still July 17th, 2020. You’re home from work, or logging off of Zoom, and you’re thinking about dinner, about the chores still ahead of you despite it being a Friday night. The unfair reality is that chores still exist during the pandemic, which, to be honest, sucks somehow as much as everything else. It’s the little things, you think. So, you plop onto the couch, your bed, and decide to ease the tension, to indulge a little; you decide to scroll through Twitter.

Last night was shaking and pretty loud
My cat is purring, it scratches my skin
So what is wrong with another sin?

It’s soft at first, almost a noise that could be mistaken: a neighbor with a vacuum, or the rumble of a car outside. But it grows from a buzz, an even beating like the steady strum of your thumb on the screen of your phone. You think, Is that an electric guitar? as you look up for a moment, confused but, no, it’s gone. But as you return to the screen and scroll far enough to see Susan Orlean’s tweet—Drunk—the music crashes against you at concert volume—Here I am! It’s the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and it’s the perfect ballad, full of urgent passion and thunderous riffs, for the ascension of our patron saint. So, too, is this riff on the classic cocktail born in New Orleans, the Hurricane, a libation fit as any for these certainly uncertain times and for those of us who need a wallop of a cocktail.

The Hurricane itself is a riff on the daiquiri (a rum sour) and came into existence in the 1940s after World War II when whiskey was hard to find but (bad) rum was plenty; it got its name from the curvy shape of the glass it was served in. The Foal Orlean has all the classic elements associated with the Hurricane—rums, passion fruit and citrus—but swaps the orange juice for sauvignon blanc, and the simple syrup and grenadine for a rosé syrup, then it’s all topped with some bubbly rosé because you can.

Recipe: Foal Orlean

4oz Sauvagnon Blanc*
1oz White Rum
1oz Dark Rum
2oz Passion Fruit Juice
1oz Lemon Juice
2oz Rosé Syrup**
Bubbly Rosé to top

1. Add ice to a wine glass. (And don’t be a snob about it, okay?)

2. Add all ingredients except for the Bubbly Rosé to your wine glass and stir until incorporated; top with Rosé.

3. Grab your phone. Crank the Scorpions. Tap that app. Offer up your inebriated tweets as prayer to the patron saint of pandemic drinking. (And don’t forget to tag @susanorlean and @btimm_drinking while you’re at it.)

Notes: *Orange Wines (any employee at a small bodega in the hippest parts of town will tell you) are too nice and expensive to put into a cocktail which is why I went with the original oopsy of Sauvagnon Blanc which is softly tart, floral, and affordable.

**Rosé Syrup: Reduce 8oz/1c of Rosé over medium-high heat until it’s halved (to 4oz), and then add 4oz of white sugar and stir until it is dissolved. This will keep in the refrigerator for months.

(You can find frozen Passion Fruit juice at Whole Foods, or you can use a juice you find at your local grocers though these will likely be fortified with sugar already so reduce the amount of Rosé Syrup by half to start and add more as needed.)