Recommendations for National Wine Day

Jan Van Dalen, “Bacchus”, mid 17th century

May 25 is National Wine Day. Here on Travalanche we have something of an Americana fixation, and that would appear to rule out wine, at first blush (see what I did there?). In the realm of intoxicants, beer would seem to be the national beverage (and we have indeed written several posts related to beer, too many to link to here), followed closely by whiskey, with its ties to Irish American saloons, and native producers like Jack Daniels (distilled just a few miles from my dad’s Tennessee hometown) and the Old West.

But wine actually happens to be especially relevant to the usual themes of this blog in a roundabout way, and I wrote about that quite a bit in my book No Applause, as well. Theatre in the western world was born of an entire religious festival surrounding the God of wine, of course. The best information we have is that the beverage was invented in the Caucasus around 6,000 B.C. From there it moved quite naturally through Anatolia to the Greek peninsula.

And vaudeville, the word anyway, if not the style of entertainment that evolved out of it, was born in French wine country in the late Middle Ages. Pretty central!

As for American wine? Why I mentioned it here not a week ago: silent movie star Natalie Kingston was a descendant of Agoston Haraszthy, Father of California Wine. 

I am not a connoisseur, but my good mate Jonathan Cristaldi is. And he has just started a terrific podcast show, Cristaldi’s Crush. I encourage you to listen, because Jonny is not a dry fellow (see what I did there?) but a witty and quirky one. I first met him when he did an extremely Dada theatre piece at Dixon Place in New York. A few months later, we did this weird thing together! He’s serious about wine, but he’s an entertaining chap. If reality TV ever needs a presenter on this stuff, either for a competition show, or a travel show, or whatever, he has my endorsement. He’d be way better than that guy Steven from Season One of Top Chef! Read the episode descriptions at the link and you’ll see what I mean. Listen to Cristaldi’s Crush here.

On another topic, May 25 is also national Tap Dance Day, probably because it is the birthday of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Peruse all my posts related to tap dance here. But remember — please tap dance responsibly.