Trust Your Senses
TASTING NOTES: “A Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir hailing from Carneros and the Russian River Valley. It’s a cool climate Pinot aged in 30% new French oak with notes of bright cherry, vanilla, and oak.” (AbV 14.2%)
VARIETALS: 100% Pinot Noir
BARRELS: Finish 18 months in 30% new French Oak
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: The movie Gaslight.
Before “gaslighting” was a word you could throw around at brunch, it was just a movie — a 1944 MGM thriller starring Ingrid Bergman as a woman whose husband slowly convinces her she’s going mad by, among other things, secretly dimming the gas lamps in their London townhouse and insisting she’s imagining it. Bergman won the Best Actress Oscar for the role, which is usually where a film’s cultural footprint ends: a trophy, a poster, a slot on someone’s letterboxd list.
Except somewhere along the line the title stopped being a title and started being a verb. Psychologists picked it up in the 1960s as shorthand for a very specific kind of manipulation. Cultural critics ran with it in the 2010s. By 2022, Merriam-Webster had named it Word of the Year, reporting a 1,740% spike in lookups, and today it’s diluted enough that half the time it just means “someone disagreed with me on the internet.” A film that played in theaters for three weeks eighty years ago is now doing rhetorical heavy lifting in approximately every group chat in America.
The Chicks named their 2020 album after it. This winery named a Pinot after the album. And here we are — a long way from a London townhouse — deciding to trust our senses anyway.
