Hey there,
As we were leaving our last round of workshop, the label on a bottle of wine caught my eye. Pissenlits….
We’d been meeting at Blackbird Wine and Atomic Cheese.
Some words are made for comedy, in abstract ways. It’s not about the meaning of the word so much as the way letters come together, the feeling of saying it out loud or in the mind, connotations over denotation.
Words are weird. They’re visual, with an auditory aspect, abstract and capable of conjuring up concrete images. How do we know what anybody means, ever, really? Ha! Look at a word too long, and it can lose all meaning…
I’m sure we all have our own subjective, personal relationship to the sound of words…but this one is ready-made for Cockney rhyming slang, Pissenlits, Brahams and Liszt, he got pretty pissed…you know it.
Turns out, pissenlits is French for dandelion—but other than that, it is just as it sounds:
In French, dandelion is pissenlit, a noun composed of a conjugated form of the verb pisser, to piss, the preposition en, meaning in, and the noun lit, bed, because this plant was formerly well known for its diuretic properties.
Andy Diaz, wine store proprietor, cracked opened the bottle and showed us what an odd little discovery Pissenlits really is. “It comes with a video,” he said. The wine is aged in barrels with an opening. A special life form—a mold? A fungus? I’ve forgotten, lost as I was in thinking about how people even know what’s safe to consume—…this persistent, small but extensive network of life creates a kind of visual white netting over the top of the fermenting white wine, until it tastes more like sherry or brandy, or somewhere in between, than like any Chardonnay. This wine is made in working with nature, not against it.
What I love is how a person can turn in almost any direction and learn. It’s a big world, and a small world, and here we are.
I miss that workshop already. I hope all the writers, who gave so much, keep writing! Circle back around! :)
And if any of you are interested in working together, let me know.
Cheers,
Wine and words.
xo
Wine and Words
Pissenlits! Thank you! The name has been driving me crazy for a week!