Looking for just the right wine to toast the recent court victories bolstering gay marriage?
Here’s a story I wrote earlier this month about some wineries that have come out in support of gay marriage by putting that message right on the bottle — and backing it up with donations from sales of the wine.
To recap, the wines I found were:
Same-Sex Meritage based in Northern California and cutely named since “meritage” means a Bordeaux-style blend and sounds a lot like marriage. For each bottle sold, $1 goes to the advocacy group Freedom to Marry.
Egalite, a bubbly from the Burgundy region of France. Each quarter, a portion of profits is donated to a LGBT nonprofit organization chosen by fans of the wine on Facebook; $15,000 has been donated since the wine’s January launch.
Genetic Pinot Noir, which refers to sexual orientation having genetic origins. Stand Tall Wines was founded by Larisa Stephenson and partner Dana Sabin. The wine is being made in the Napa Valley using grapes shipped from Oregon’s Willamette Valley and 1 percent of Genetic sales is being donated to the Napa LGBTQ Connection.
Barefoot Wine & Bubbly, this one was a surprise to me, but it turns out Barefoot has been supporting marriage rights for gays for 25 years, donating to local LGBT centers and other organizations, investing in Pride Week events, even putting up a 20-foot-tall inflatable wedding cake in front of San Francisco’s City Hall to show support for gay marriage.
All this talk about marriage has got me thinking about my own wedding to Mr. Vinecdote, which took place 28 years ago this month. It was a beautiful, sunny Sunday in North Texas. Just us and the local Justice of the Peace, a Texas official who can perform marriages. She met us at the courthouse on the way to get her usual Sunday papers (ah, those were the days, children) and it was cool having the whole building to ourselves, our footsteps echoing down the empty halls. Afterwards we went to Carrows and had the two-egg breakfast special. Because that is how we roll.
An additional note. The judge was a friend of ours, a fabulous woman named Arthur Bea Williams who was the first black JP to serve in that county. She had just been elected which worked out well for us because the previous guy refused to perform mixed-race marriages, a problem for my Caucasian self and Chinese-born spouse.
Change. Sometimes it really is for the better.
Cheers, romantically.