Wall Street Journal - Oddly enough, the first time I encountered Pinot Grigio was at Elaine's, the legendary Manhattan restaurant, back in the 1980s, when the literary lions of the silver age were roaring and preening there. (Norman Mailer was the one who called his era the silver age; Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner ruled the golden age, and I was a representative, he informed me cheerfully, of the bronze age.) Most of the writers who frequented the place drank scotch mixed with testosterone. Mailer, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Maas, Gay Talese, Kurt Vonnegut—these guys were the highball generation, and they seldom bothered with anything as wimpy as white wine. Nevertheless there were usually women present, and I recall a lot of Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio on the tables. Not being much of a scotch fan, I drank gallons of it myself, though I tried not to do so when Mailer was watching. Read more...