Wine and some sick love affairs
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet were lucky to have had so many good wines almost right in front of them. Being from Verona, a beautiful Roman city in the Veneto, the two had Soave, Bardolino and Valpolicella within a few miles or less. Against that very cool wine reality, one has to wonder..what’s the deal with all the drama and suicide. There is no romance or couple more famous than these two. So, at Valentine’s Day they kind of fall into the top spot almost by default. Soave is the wine of these most famous lovers of all. The white wine from the Veneto was chosen as the official wine of ‘Verona in Love’, an event dedicated to all of us who are in love, held from February 9 -17, under the very balcony in Verona that was made famous by William Shakespeare.
Bogie and Bacall
There is no way to talk about great love affairs and leave out Bogie and Bacall. We love this video from The Big Sleep. Listen to the lyrics and feel the romantic, now bygone, notions of the past. The lyrics were written by Joe Greene, with music composition by Stan Kenton and Charles Lawrence. Probably the best known version of the song was recorded in 1944 by Anita O’Day along with Kenton’s orchestra. A version was also recorded by Ella Fitzgerald the following year.
And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine.
\
Napoleon and Josephine
Napoleon and Josephine have to be included in any great love affair list. Where’s the wine angle here, you wonder? Well, Napoleon’s wife Josephine, once described by her chamber maid as a “sober woman”, maintained a wine cellar with more than 13,000 bottles. Probably the greatest surprise in the 13,286-bottle wine list was the clear predominance of bordeaux, as Parisian high society usually plumped for burgundies at the time. She was a maverick to be sure.
There’s a wonderful exhibition of Josephine’s Cellar Wine at Malmaison during the Empire Châteaux de Malmaison and de Bois-Préau Museum lasting March 8. It is said that while most of her contemporaries were drinking Burgundy, Champagne and sweet wines from the Mediterranean, Josephine filled her guests’ glasses with Bordeaux, Cotes-du-Rhone and wines from as far away as South Africa.
Brangelina
It’s a stormy romance, if one believes the tabloids. TMZ reports that things got so heated on one occasion that Angie emptied a glass of wine in Brad’s face.Now we hear that Brad is taking a wine-making class. It might be you’re sort of bored and don’t know what you want to do with your life. You have gazillion dollars. You never have to lift a finger to do any real work again for as long as you live. You could buy any bottle of wine you ever dreamed of having. Dude, you could even buy any vineyard you wanted. So, why? Why would you waste your time on something like learning how to make wine? It’s not easy work. It could be that the next time Quentin Tarrintino stops in to persuade you to be in a picture that “home grown” is the best idea?
