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The Wine Lover’s Daughter | Chapter 1: Thwick

The Wine Lover’s Daughter | Chapter 1: Thwick

My father was a lousy driver and a two-finger typist, but he could open a wine bottle as deftly as any swain ever undressed his lover. Nearly every evening of my childhood, I watched him cut the capsule – the foil sleeve that sheathes the bottleneck – with a sharp knife. Then he plunged the bore of a butterfly corkscrew into the exact center of the cork, twirled the handle, and, after the brass levers rose like two supplicant arms, pushed them down and gently twisted out the cork. Its pop was satisfying but restrained, not the fustian whoop of a champagne cork but a well-bred thwick. He once said that the cork was one of three inventions that had proved unequivocally beneficial to the human race. (The others were the wheel and Kleenex.)
Last Waltz in Vienna Extract | Part Two | Youth and Freedom

Last Waltz in Vienna Extract | Part Two | Youth and Freedom

Kirtag in St Gilgen was a very different occasion, and though my memories of that Day of Atonement visit long ago were somewhat vague, it still seemed impossible to believe that this was the same building. Austria’s best stage designers had changed it into a very life-like imitation of that famous holiday resort not far from Salzburg. They could not, even if they wanted to, put a good part of Vienna under water and bring the St Wolfgang lake into the Konzerthaus, but the White Horse Inn, the lakeside hostelry known to operetta lovers all over the world, had been reconstructed inside the building, so had the village square, maypole and all, and on various levels there were farms with real cows and horses in their stables, country-inn gardens with buxom waitresses in old-style peasant costumes serving wine and beer, and any number of bands from the genuine ‘tara-ra-boom-de-ay’ to modern ones playing the swing hits from Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers films by Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, evergreens that have outlasted my youth.

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