Sarah Jessica Parker's Invivo X, Sauvignon Blanc 2021
In what is purely a self-indulgent screed about the 1990s (just #90skids things).
This week I am drinking an Invivo X, Sarah Jessica Parker 2021 Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand ($17.99 at Hudson Wines).
Readers… This one is good.
As described in the tasting notes, the wine has “abundant notes of grapefruit, honeysuckle, passionfruit and citrus zest evolve from the glass. At first, the palate is expansive and leads with a wall of sweet-scented fruits and a soft – but balanced – acid spine. The mid-palate grows to another level, where supple phenolics offer a framework to further lift the fruit.”
SJP found a great wine to slap her label onto! The nose is super bright and aromatic, and has a very specific floral top-note with hints of apple and lime. The wine is drinkable and fresh and tastes like an orange creamsicle (but, you know, in a refined way). I honestly would buy this again.
Invivo has been collaborating with SJP for three years now, producing a line that also includes a rosè and a lower-calorie label Sevenly. The promotional videos for this wine is so funny because it makes no effort to prove SJP had anything to do with the product. Look, I don’t need her to stomp on any grapes (especially not in her SJP Collection kitten heels), but girl, give us nothing.
In the videos, two Kiwis from Invivo meet SJP at a West Village restaurant called something like La Tortellino with a serious-looking metal briefcase filled with beakers of Sauvignon blanc, to which Sarah Jessica then blends like a mad, drunk, scientist. She says precise words like Let’s take six and add, like, three. This year, Zooming from New York, Sarah Jessica made an astute assessment of the wine she had just created: “it’s kind of high with a little bit of an err, err, err,” she screams in a high-pitched tone. I get what she means.
No days off luvs
X, SJ
The wine fits into Sarah Jessica’s apparent love for food and wine (including, of course, her own Sauvignon blanc). Her Grubstreet diet from last year makes clear her Mediterranean diet. She loves salami. She loves cheese: Matthew saves the rind, she shares, which I read like Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. And, with little context, she says that Matthew “soaks beans three nights a week,” to which a normal person might wonder, and does what with them?1
Sarah Jessica is decidedly (by me) uncool. I mean, having a three-part name, including TWO first names, is so Try Hard Parker. She has the most twee Instagram sign-off (X, SJ). And yet, SJP can convincingly act as if she regularly drinks this $17 dollar bottle of wine. Now that’s acting!!!
This wine, like SJP herself, is not cool. It kind of reminds me of the neighborhood she (and no one else before her) popularized: the West Village. For reasons that can only be answered by the word ‘Aunt’ I live here too. In fact, from my window, I can currently see a hoard of German tourists posing in front of Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment (on the show, the street is used as a facsimile of the Upper East Side). The real SJP lived, until last year, in a townhouse a block away on Charles Street, which she sold for $15 million. Nevertheless, her image is an indelible part of my everyday life. There’s the Magnolia Cupcakes on Bleecker and W11th, which is constantly swamped despite it appearing on the show just once. There’s the new SJP Collection shoe store on the corner of Bleecker and Perry. And I sometimes see her husband Matthew (who saves the rind) walking the dog.
But more than the physical Carrie Bradshaw, the milieu of the show is present all over the West Village. She pretty much invented a girl walking down a street. Look, I love the show as much as the next girl in a tutu, but the West Village has become a straight-girl Eden, with women wearing tulle dresses and a fun hat dragging along their schlubby-er Aidans to sip espresso martinis (Not to be so Fran Leibowitz or anything).
I have been thinking about New York in the 1990s a lot recently, as I am currently reading Chuck Klosterman’s new book The Nineties, the well-received cultural history of the decade. Klosterman argues that the decade was defined by ennui — Reality Bites, punk music, Jesus' Son — born from a “fear of invisible market forces that infiltrated everything.” The neoliberal shocks of the decade, especially the deregulation of the financial market, made disaffection the prime modality of Cool, Klosterman argues. As a Time Magazine article from July 1990 noted of Generation X: “the twentysomething generation is balking at work, marriage and baby-boomer values.”
Sipping my SJP Sauvignon blanc, I couldn’t help but wonder (sorry) why SATC is never mentioned in the book, despite the show premiering in 1998. The timing of it all makes sense: three of the four actresses are among the oldest members of Generation X (Kim Cattrall, however, is a decade older). The HBO revolution also helped define the 90s.
I’d argue that the landscape of disaffected youth and Courtney Love-types was produced by its antithesis: the affected youth. Everyone — the core women, their catty rivals, their beaus — are strivers. We never see them once unemployed, aside from Charlotte’s decision to become a stay-at-home wife. That big-bodied buttery Cabernet (or Sauvignon blanc) sipped on the hottest rooftop bar in the city was a sign of making it. Of, well, selling out. These were people who shaved their armpits, who saw their future in the shape of a corporate ladder, who cared (gasp). We see Cattrall’s Samantha move into the wilderness of the Meatpacking District, the first signs of an encroaching yuppy class that could only happen through deindustrialization and neoliberalism (I’m sorry, I’m done now).
The haves and the have-nots produced by the market shifts Klosterman writes about reminds me of my Gen Z. We are certainly in an era defined by Sex and The City as a model for the platonic ideal of excess and striving; of girl-bossing and brand rep-ing. It’s cool to work hard. But what happened to the show after the 2008 financial crisis? (I’ll tell you: two unholy movies). What happens to us, in 2022, after the stock market bubble bursts? Will we still be drinking this Sauvignon blanc or will we go back to PBRs?
Yes, bitch, I brought it back to the damn wine. I’m rambling now, but the wine is certainly a product of what Carrie Bradshaw, twenty years later, would think of as a good wine. It’s not cool. It is not funky, not weird, and it’s pretty square. It’s a wine for a certain time, for a certain person. For strivers and girls in tutus who want a sip of SJP’s version of the 1990s. And if you so choose, she makes batched Cosmopolitans now, too.
X, SJ
An aside: as someone obsessed with celebrity vehicular manslaughter, I wonder if MB still thinks about that time in Ireland in 1987 when he killed two people, with his Ferris Bueller co-star Jennifer Grey riding shotgun. Matthew is a Mets fan though, so it’s all love. Does SJP comfort him when he wakes up in cold sweats in the middle of the night? Matthew saves the rind, he hears in his head over and over. Maybe his compulsive bean soaking is therapeutic, like when they take traumatized child actors to pet horses.