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