With the debacles of the last two weeks lingering on my palate, I made every effort to ensure that this week I would strike gold. An exhilarating, soaring track from Bag Raiders, appropriately titled “Golden Wings,” rang in my ears as I combed doggedly through the liquor store, not to be denied my prize. My efforts were rewarded when I discovered an affordably priced Viognier, called Genesis ($8.99, 2008, from the Columbia Valley in Washington state).
The pièce de résistance came when I combined that superb vintage with a Spicy Chicken sandwich combo, from Wendy’s.
To continue the biblical analogies evoked by the name of the wine: If ancient Babylon’s cityscape had been populated by fast-food franchises, Wendy’s would have risen above the rest as majestically as the tower of Babel.
(Gustave Doré, The Confusion of Tongues, 1865; engraving. The tower of Babel is sometimes identified with Babylon’s great ziggurat, built in the seventh century BCE and dedicated to the god Marduk. Also, to divert charges of blasphemy, I must note that I make this claim concerning the greatness of Wendy’s only because I am currently living in a region devoid of Bojangles.)
The lusciously ripe, yet smoothly modulated citrus and pineapple notes of the wine pluck delicately at the fiery blend of peppers and spices that flavor the chicken, creating a polyphonic harmony of soothingly cool and tantalizingly hot gustatory sensations. So intense were these sensations that I hallucinated briefly and, for a moment, an achingly beautiful, turquoise-skinned sea nymph sat before me on a rocky outcropping overlooking the ocean. Her fingers cascaded gracefully over the strings of a flaming harp, producing a melody more mellifluous than any manufactured by Mozart. However, when I grasped her hand and brought it to my lips to kiss it reverently, I instead found myself embracing the magnificently seasoned chicken sandwich. What I had taken for the bracing, briny smell of the sea was simply the aroma of the French fries saturating the air. Was the moisture that I felt the spray of a wave breaking on the rocks? No. It was only wine, which I spilled on myself in my enthusiastic stupor.
The kaleidoscopic amalgamation of sensory perceptions provoked by this pairing results in a kind of transcendental synaesthesia. Eating this combo meal and drinking this wine, I am transported upward. I soar to a higher plane of existence and feel as Jesus must have when he ascended the mountain and was transfigured into divine radiance.
(Raphael, Transfiguration, 1516-1520; oil on wood; Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana. The manner in which I typically relate to the world is more comparable to that of the possessed boy in the right foreground.)
Normally, I would be concerned with the effect of this meal on my physique. But, since I have sloughed off my constricting corporeal carapace and metamorphosed into celestial luminescence, the niggling nuisances of the material realm no longer distress me. Hence, with every fiber of my being, I recommend this pairing emphatically.
(Published originally on November 2nd, 2011.)
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