Shelf Awareness
"Here in Nashville, the Wine Shoppe is to wine what Parnassus is to books: a comfortable neighborhood spot where you can walk in, chat with knowledgeable folks, browse to your heart's content, and walk out with something selected especially for your taste," noted Musing, the store blog for Parnassus Books, in a post headlined "Bottled Poetry: How to Pair Wine with Books."
Last year, the bookseller began partnering with the local wine shop for monthly "Wine with the Author" events, calling it "a natural decision--one of those lightning-strikes-and-angels-sing kind of moments.""If experience in wine retail has taught me anything, it's that book clubs might just be an excuse to get together with friends and have a glass or two with some conversation in between," said Dan Hutchinson, general manager of the Wine Shoppe at Green Hills.
He explained how he selects wines to go with books: "My first rule of thumb is to stay away from the obvious, such as the name of a wine or how it is marketed. It would be fine to pour a California wine with a book that was set in California, and, of course, that would make sense. But it's more fun if you can go deeper than that and say, 'Well, this book is set in the late 1800s in California, and the wine we are pouring is from a winery whose founders moved to this same town at around that time. So it is possible to imagine that these characters may have known the founders or at least would have shared life experience. I think that gives the wine a story as opposed to just a cursory thought.... If everything works the way it should, the book tells you what to pour and the adventure of finding it can be the most fun."
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