SWP Book Club: Aftershocks & Pandolfa Wines
A virtual book club and wine tasting experience designed to foster conversation and connection over a good read and a great bottle of wine.
The SWP Book Club experience begins with a customized and beautifully designed book club packgage delivered directly to your door and culminates in a 90-minute virtual book club session and wine tasting where you'll meet and discuss the themes, allegories and narrative of Aftershocks, a memoir from Whiting Award–winner Nadia Owusu, with other SWP Book Club members.
The wine tasting component is led by a certified sommelier, and the experience includes a pre-recorded author Q&A where you'll have the chance to get your most burning questions about the book answered by Nadia Owusu herself!
Your SWP Book Club Package includes:
A hardcover copy of Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu
A bottle of wine from Pandolfa Wines, your choice of Sangiovese or Chardonnay
A non-parishable food pairing
An access code to the 90-minute virtual book club & wine tasting session
A Q&A with author Nadia Owusu
About the Book
Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.
With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together.
Aftershocks is the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand.
About the Wines
We’ll be pairing Aftershocks with a selection of wines from Pandolfa, a family owned wine estate located at the foot of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. The winery as it exists today was built by Noelia Ricci, the daughter of Giuseppe Ricci who planted the first vines. Today the winery is owned by Noelia’s granddaughter, Paola Piscopo.
Participants will have a choice between one of the following wines:
Pandolfa 2019 ‘Federico’ Sangiovese
Sustainably farmed and planted at high density yielding a wine that is bright ruby red with a nose like a basket full of black cherries and wild red berries. On the palate the wine is savoury and full of vibrancy, with substantial tannins providing great structure. Sangiovese is the signature grape of Tuscany, it’s birthplace is Romagna, the precise appellation from which this bottle comes!
Pandolfa 2019 ‘Battista’ Chardonnay
Fermented in stainless steel and aged on its lees for three months for extra dimension and complexity, this wine is well balanced, ripe and succulent. Subtle flavours of nectarine, apple, and white florals move through to a soft mineral character on the finish.
A virtual book club and wine tasting experience designed to foster conversation and connection over a good read and a great bottle of wine.
The SWP Book Club experience begins with a customized and beautifully designed book club packgage delivered directly to your door and culminates in a 90-minute virtual book club session and wine tasting where you'll meet and discuss the themes, allegories and narrative of Aftershocks, a memoir from Whiting Award–winner Nadia Owusu, with other SWP Book Club members.
The wine tasting component is led by a certified sommelier, and the experience includes a pre-recorded author Q&A where you'll have the chance to get your most burning questions about the book answered by Nadia Owusu herself!
Your SWP Book Club Package includes:
A hardcover copy of Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu
A bottle of wine from Pandolfa Wines, your choice of Sangiovese or Chardonnay
A non-parishable food pairing
An access code to the 90-minute virtual book club & wine tasting session
A Q&A with author Nadia Owusu
About the Book
Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.
With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together.
Aftershocks is the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand.
About the Wines
We’ll be pairing Aftershocks with a selection of wines from Pandolfa, a family owned wine estate located at the foot of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. The winery as it exists today was built by Noelia Ricci, the daughter of Giuseppe Ricci who planted the first vines. Today the winery is owned by Noelia’s granddaughter, Paola Piscopo.
Participants will have a choice between one of the following wines:
Pandolfa 2019 ‘Federico’ Sangiovese
Sustainably farmed and planted at high density yielding a wine that is bright ruby red with a nose like a basket full of black cherries and wild red berries. On the palate the wine is savoury and full of vibrancy, with substantial tannins providing great structure. Sangiovese is the signature grape of Tuscany, it’s birthplace is Romagna, the precise appellation from which this bottle comes!
Pandolfa 2019 ‘Battista’ Chardonnay
Fermented in stainless steel and aged on its lees for three months for extra dimension and complexity, this wine is well balanced, ripe and succulent. Subtle flavours of nectarine, apple, and white florals move through to a soft mineral character on the finish.
A virtual book club and wine tasting experience designed to foster conversation and connection over a good read and a great bottle of wine.
The SWP Book Club experience begins with a customized and beautifully designed book club packgage delivered directly to your door and culminates in a 90-minute virtual book club session and wine tasting where you'll meet and discuss the themes, allegories and narrative of Aftershocks, a memoir from Whiting Award–winner Nadia Owusu, with other SWP Book Club members.
The wine tasting component is led by a certified sommelier, and the experience includes a pre-recorded author Q&A where you'll have the chance to get your most burning questions about the book answered by Nadia Owusu herself!
Your SWP Book Club Package includes:
A hardcover copy of Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu
A bottle of wine from Pandolfa Wines, your choice of Sangiovese or Chardonnay
A non-parishable food pairing
An access code to the 90-minute virtual book club & wine tasting session
A Q&A with author Nadia Owusu
About the Book
Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.
With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together.
Aftershocks is the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand.
About the Wines
We’ll be pairing Aftershocks with a selection of wines from Pandolfa, a family owned wine estate located at the foot of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. The winery as it exists today was built by Noelia Ricci, the daughter of Giuseppe Ricci who planted the first vines. Today the winery is owned by Noelia’s granddaughter, Paola Piscopo.
Participants will have a choice between one of the following wines:
Pandolfa 2019 ‘Federico’ Sangiovese
Sustainably farmed and planted at high density yielding a wine that is bright ruby red with a nose like a basket full of black cherries and wild red berries. On the palate the wine is savoury and full of vibrancy, with substantial tannins providing great structure. Sangiovese is the signature grape of Tuscany, it’s birthplace is Romagna, the precise appellation from which this bottle comes!
Pandolfa 2019 ‘Battista’ Chardonnay
Fermented in stainless steel and aged on its lees for three months for extra dimension and complexity, this wine is well balanced, ripe and succulent. Subtle flavours of nectarine, apple, and white florals move through to a soft mineral character on the finish.