Hello and welcome to Book Wine Club Season 2, a podcast where I, Lauren Popish, pair my latest read with a new wine, and then talk it out with my opinionated and inebriated co hosts, Ryan Consbruck and Julia Popish. 

On today’s episode Ryan, Julia, and I will discuss a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost. in Real Life by Brandon Taylor. This one’s got science, nachos, and an unexpected romance. In this episode, we will discuss the entire book, including our ratings. 

Today we’ll be pairing our read with a glass or three of Margins - Chenin Blanc Skin Fermented 2019. Pour yourself a glass and stay tuned.

Link to book: https://amzn.to/2X0n9aO

Link to wine: https://www.kingstonwine.com/wines/Margins-Chenin-Blanc-Skin-Fermented-2019-w7217480y8

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.  Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

About the author:

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His work has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed Reader, O: The Oprah Magazine, Gay Mag, The New Yorker online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow.  

About the wine:

30 days of skin contact on organically farmed Chenin Blanc Clarksburg. Chenin is one of our favorite grapes, and the skin contact really makes an intense and lovely twist on the noble variety. Grapes are hand harvested, all ambient yeasts for the ferment, no filtering or fining, and all neutral oak vessels. A small sulfite dose for stability is the only thing added.

Hello and welcome to Book Wine Club Season 2, a podcast where I, Lauren Popish, pair my latest read with a new wine, and then talk it out with my opinionated and inebriated co hosts, Ryan Consbruck and Julia Popish. 

On today’s episode Ryan, Julia, and I will be discussing the second half of White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode where we discussed the first half of the book, you’re going to want to stop, go back, and listen to that episode first.  

Today we’ll be pairing our read with a glass or three of Amour Geneve blue wine. Pour yourself a glass and stay tuned.

Link to book: https://amzn.to/2PhScK3

Link to wine: https://www.amourbluforever.com/product-page/12x-amour-gen%C3%A8ve

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

About the author:

“I grew up poor and white.  While my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not.  In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis and asking how each of my other group locations have socialized me to collude with racism. In so doing, I have been able to address in greater depth my multiple locations and how they function together to hold racism in place. I now make the distinction that I grew up poor and white, for my experience of poverty would have been different had I not been white” (DiAngelo, 2006).

About the wine:

Throughout my childhood, my father had a special connection with all shades of blue: from the tint of navy blue in the lenses of his eyeglasses, to his sky-blue driving gloves. He was also an avid collector of many precious blue pieces of jewelry. They ranged from turquoise and topaz bracelets all the way down to the blue historical artifacts he would collect abroad while on military deployment. All of these items complemented his rich and colorful personality.  

Upon his tragic departure, many of these precious heirlooms were lost and never found. Finding a way to express my father's unique sense and expression of blue to the world became my dream and then our mission.

It's been quite an adventure. We've become very cognizant of how others have failed in many ways.  Nonetheless, we persisted in finding a way to produce a truly natural, organic, and delightful blend of nature, science, and taste.  A wine which matures throughout a natural fermentation and aging cycle, while retaining its transfixing color and also fully satisfying all the requirements of the FDA, TTB, and European Union. With these institutional approvals, patents on our process and formula, and now growing acclaim, the dream has become reality.

Get in touch

Our sommelier, Emily Rutan: @emilythesomm
Lauren Popish: @laurenpopish
Julia Popish: @juliapopish
Ryan Consbruck @specialrobotdog

Hello and welcome to Book Wine Club Season 2, a podcast where I, Lauren Popish, pair my latest read with a new wine, and then talk it out with my opinionated and inebriated co hosts. 

On today’s episode Ryan, Julia, and I will be exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality in White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. This one’s got racial stereotypes, white supremacy, and a whole lot of reckoning. In this episode, we will discuss the first half of the book. Our final rating will come in the next episode to give you enough time to read along with us.  

Today we’ll be pairing our read with a glass or three of Amour Geneve blue wine. Pour yourself a glass and stay tuned.

Link to book: https://amzn.to/2PhScK3

Link to wine: https://www.amourbluforever.com/product-page/12x-amour-gen%C3%A8ve

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

About the author:

“I grew up poor and white.  While my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not.  In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis and asking how each of my other group locations have socialized me to collude with racism. In so doing, I have been able to address in greater depth my multiple locations and how they function together to hold racism in place. I now make the distinction that I grew up poor and white, for my experience of poverty would have been different had I not been white” (DiAngelo, 2006).

About the wine:

Throughout my childhood, my father had a special connection with all shades of blue: from the tint of navy blue in the lenses of his eyeglasses, to his sky-blue driving gloves. He was also an avid collector of many precious blue pieces of jewelry. They ranged from turquoise and topaz bracelets all the way down to the blue historical artifacts he would collect abroad while on military deployment. All of these items complemented his rich and colorful personality.  

Upon his tragic departure, many of these precious heirlooms were lost and never found. Finding a way to express my father's unique sense and expression of blue to the world became my dream and then our mission.

It's been quite an adventure. We've become very cognizant of how others have failed in many ways.  Nonetheless, we persisted in finding a way to produce a truly natural, organic, and delightful blend of nature, science, and taste.  A wine which matures throughout a natural fermentation and aging cycle, while retaining its transfixing color and also fully satisfying all the requirements of the FDA, TTB, and European Union. With these institutional approvals, patents on our process and formula, and now growing acclaim, the dream has become reality.

Get in touch

Our sommelier, Emily Rutan: @emilythesomm
Lauren Popish: @laurenpopish
Julia Popish: @juliapopish
Ryan Consbruck @specialrobotdog

Hello and welcome to Book Wine Club Season 2, a podcast where I, Lauren Popish, pair my latest read with a new wine, and then talk it out with my opinionated and inebriated co hosts, Ryan Conbruck and Julia Popish. 

On today’s episode Ryan, Julia, and I will be discussing the second half of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode where we discussed the first half of the book, you’re going to want to stop, go back, and listen to that first.  

Today we’ll be pairing our read with a glass or three of a 2019 rose called Queen of the Sierra by Forlorn Hope from Rorick Heritage Vineyard. Pour yourself a glass and stay tuned.

Link to book: https://amzn.to/2UCizhe

Link to wine: https://grainvine.com/products/forlorn-hope-queen-of-the-sierra-rorick-heritage-vineyard-sierra-foothills-rose

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Part 2 by Ocean Vuong

It’s 256 pages in length. For this episode, we read from halfway to the end.

About the book

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

About the author:

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist and novelist. He is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry. His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Grant the same year.

About the wine:

Each of the Forlorn Hope wines may be put through very different fermentations en route to becoming one of our Rare Creatures -- Sèmillon is destemmed and pressed, then fermented in old and neutral barrels; Gewürztraminer is destemmed and fermented on the skins; Alvarelhão is fermented whole-cluster with no destemming or initial breaking of the fruit -- but throughout it all a common vein runs through the thought process in the cellar: listen to what the fermentation is saying as it transforms from fruit into wine. What does it want to become? In what direction does its nature want to lead it? In this manner we guide our ferments along, receiving suggestions and guidance from the wine and fermentative microbes themselves.

Get in touch

Our sommelier, Emily Rutan: @emilythesomm
Lauren Popish: @laurenpopish
Julia Popish: @juliapopish
Ryan Consbruck @specialrobotdog

Hello and welcome to Book Wine Club Season 2, a podcast where I, Lauren Popish, pair my latest read with a new wine, and then talk it out with my opinionated and inebriated co hosts.

On today’s episode Ryan, Julia, and I will be discussing a novel of people caught between disparate worlds asking how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. This one’s got an immigrant story, child abuse, and young love.. In this episode, we will discuss the first half of the book. Our final rating will come in the next episode to give you enough time to read along with us.  

Today we’ll be pairing our read with a glass or three of 2019 Forlorn Hope Queen of the Sierra Rorick Heritage Vineyard Sierra Foothills Rose. Pour yourself a glass and stay tuned.

Link to book: https://amzn.to/2UCizhe

Link to wine: https://grainvine.com/products/forlorn-hope-queen-of-the-sierra-rorick-heritage-vineyard-sierra-foothills-rose

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

About the author:

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist and novelist. He is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry. His debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Grant the same year.

About the wine:

Each of the Forlorn Hope wines may be put through very different fermentations en route to becoming one of our Rare Creatures -- Sèmillon is destemmed and pressed, then fermented in old and neutral barrels; Gewürztraminer is destemmed and fermented on the skins; Alvarelhão is fermented whole-cluster with no destemming or initial breaking of the fruit -- but throughout it all a common vein runs through the thought process in the cellar: listen to what the fermentation is saying as it transforms from fruit into wine. What does it want to become? In what direction does its nature want to lead it? In this manner we guide our ferments along, receiving suggestions and guidance from the wine and fermentative microbes themselves.

Get in touch

Our sommelier, Emily Rutan: @emilythesomm
Lauren Popish: @laurenpopish
Julia Popish: @juliapopish
Ryan Consbruck @specialrobotdog

Hello and welcome to Book Wine Club Season 2, a podcast where I, Lauren Popish, pair my latest read with a new wine, and then talk it out with my opinionated and inebriated co hosts, Ryan Conbruck and Julia Popish.

On today’s episode Ryan, Julia, and I will be discussing the second half of The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode where we discussed the first half of the book, you’re going to want to stop, go back, and listen to that first.

Today we’ll be pairing our read with a glass or three of 2019 white blend called Big Salt from Ovum. Pour yourself a glass and stay tuned.

Link to book: https://amzn.to/2R3qaDm

Link to wine: https://madwine.com/white-blends/92138-ovum-deep-water-big-salt-white-blend-2019.html

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

It’s 301 pages in length. For this episode, we read to page 160.  I pulled this description from online:

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

About the author:

St. John's my middle name. The books go under M.
Emily St. John Mandel's fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, was recently published in Canada and the US, and is forthcoming in the UK in August. Her previous novels include Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award among other honours, and has been translated into 33 languages. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Ovum Deep Water 'BIG SALT' White Blend 2019 

BIG SALT is a white wine that tries to capture a day at the beach in a bottle. Fresh, dry, breezy the bright aromas of the wine are met with a dry, almost salty textured palate that's well suited for sitting in the sun and hanging with friends. Sustainable and Organic vineyards throughout Oregon are the building blocks for Big Salt.

Final Rating (0-3)
Lauren Popish: 1.9
Julia Popish: 2.0
Ryan Consbruck: 2.2

Get in touch

Our sommelier, Emily Rutan: @emilythesomm
Lauren Popish: @laurenpopish
Julia Popish: @juliapopish
Ryan Consbruck @specialrobotdog

On today’s episode Ryan, Julia, and I will be discussing a novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events-a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea in The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. This one’s got acid paint, opioid addiction, and Canada. In this episode, we will discuss the first half of the book. Our final rating will come in the next episode to give you enough time to read along with us.  

Today we’ll be pairing our read with a glass or three of a 2019 white blend called Big Salt from Ovum. Pour yourself a glass and stay tuned.

Link to book: https://amzn.to/2R3qaDm

Link to wine: https://madwine.com/white-blends/92138-ovum-deep-water-big-salt-white-blend-2019.html

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

It’s 301 pages in length. For this episode, we read to page 160.  I pulled this description from online:

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

About the author:

St. John's my middle name. The books go under M.
Emily St. John Mandel's fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, was recently published in Canada and the US, and is forthcoming in the UK in August. Her previous novels include Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award among other honours, and has been translated into 33 languages. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Ovum Deep Water 'BIG SALT' White Blend 2019 

BIG SALT is a white wine that tries to capture a day at the beach in a bottle. Fresh, dry, breezy the bright aromas of the wine are met with a dry, almost salty textured palate that's well suited for sitting in the sun and hanging with friends. Sustainable and Organic vineyards throughout Oregon are the building blocks for Big Salt.

Get in touch

Our sommelier, Emily Rutan: @emilythesomm
Lauren Popish: @laurenpopish
Julia Popish: @juliapopish
Ryan Consbruck @specialrobotdog

On this episode Ryan, Julia, and I will be discussing the second half of The Overstory by Richard Powers. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode where we discussed the first half of the book, you’re going to want to stop, go back, and listen to that first. 

We’ll be pairing our read with a glass or three of 2018 Oeno (EE-NO) Pinot Noir from natural wine producer Amy Atwood. Pour yourself a glass and stay tuned.

Link to book: https://amzn.to/39Iqpdn

Link to wine: https://primalwine.com/collections/red-wine-natural-biodynamic-organic/products/oeno-pinot-noir-russian-river-valley-california-usa-red-wine

The Overstory by Richard Powers

It’s 502 pages in length. For this episode, we read to page 253.  I pulled this description from online:

The stories of nine people—Nicholas Hoel, Olivia Vandergriff, Ray Brinkman, Dorothy Cazaly, Neelay Mehta, Patricia Westerford, Douglas Pavlicek, Mimi Ma, and Adam Appich—are woven together not just with each others', but with those of the trees that they come to see as crucial conduits to the longevity, health, and sustainability of the entire planet. The grave danger that the rapacious and capricious cutting down of trees presents is the main catalyst for action for most of these characters, while others engage with the natural world in more peripheral, albeit still profound, ways.

About the author:

Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957) is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2018 Powers has published twelve novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford Universities. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.

2018 Oeno Pinot Noir from Amy Atwood

The wine is aged in neutral oak and bottled unfined and unfiltered following a non-interventionist approach. Oeno Pinot Noir is a medium-bodied red wine bursting with cherry and cranberry flavors, with some earthy forest floor elements for balance.

About Amy Atwood:

I started Amy Atwood Selections (Cleanskins Wine LLC) in 2009 because I wanted to work with wines I love and winemakers I respect. After 15 years of working for other wine wholesalers and importers, my focus had shifted towards smaller production wineries, making wines more naturally. This means organic or sustainable farming, and little to zero intervention in the winery. And most importantly, the wines have to bring joy and be delicious to drink. Wine. Naturally. We are based in California.

Get in touch

Our sommelier, Emily Rutan: @emilythesomm
Lauren Popish: @laurenpopish
Julia Popish: @juliapopish
Ryan Consbruck @specialrobotdog