I AM AN extrovert, and I’m a social drinker. These are things I’ve always known about myself, but I’ve had to relearn both during this unending period of lockdown. Early on, worried, scared and uncertain, I drank a lot of wine with my elaborate solo dinners, but that just made everything worse—the wine would make me even more depressed, and drinking it by myself, alone in my apartment, felt sad. In early April, I decided to only drink in the situations where I used to drink: when I see friends and family, even though those visits are now either virtual or, if in person, from a distance. So the stout blue bottle of Junipero Gin sent to me by my editor at The Wall Street Journal was my companion on many virtual and some in-person socially distanced cocktail hours. It led to several illuminating conversations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ms. Guillory is the author of the novels ‘The Wedding Date,’ ‘The Proposal,’ ‘The Wedding Party’ and ‘Royal Holiday.’ Her latest, ‘Party of Two,’ was published in June by Berkley.
I decided I had to try this gin in a number of ways. It is very strong on the juniper, as its name would suggest, so I wanted to know where and how this juniper flavor would come through the best. I started with a classic, a simple gin and tonic.
One of the hardest things about this pandemic for me has been the deep loneliness I’ve felt over the past five months, and the guilt that has gone along with that loneliness. My health is fine so far, as is the health of my family. My income is relatively stable (whatever stable means for a full-time writer whose income fluctuates a great deal from quarter to quarter). I don’t have children, therefore I don’t have to balance children and work, or worry about what to do about sending them back to school, the way so many of my friends do. I feel bad complaining about being lonely, when so many have it so much worse than I do. But wow, living alone as an extrovert during a pandemic, where the key directive is to not be around other people, is patently miserable. So my God, was it wonderful to see my friend Jill in person, as we sat six feet away from each other in lounge chairs in my small backyard and drank gin and tonics and vented about our lives.
Jill and I have been friends for over 30 years. She and her family feel like family to me; her children, whom I adore, call me Auntie Jasmine. I’m Black and she’s white, but we don’t have to dance around race issues with one another. We’ve talked about race and racism a lot over our friendship. And when we talk about how we’re doing during this pandemic and time of racial upheaval, we don’t have to do the “I know everyone else has it worse than me, but” thing when we complain. We can just vent and get it out of our systems, which is such a relief.
This time, Jill and I talked about Junípero Serra. The thing is, I can’t look at something named Junipero—especially something made in San Francisco, as the bottle proudly tells me—without thinking of Junípero Serra. I was born and raised in, and still live in, Northern California. In fourth grade I, along with every California elementary school student, learned about the California missions, led by Father Junípero Serra, who we learned brought education and religion and civilization to the native Californians already living here. That was the whitewashed version of history. The truth is much more complicated.
I didn’t learn until adulthood that the Native people in the missions that Junípero Serra led were forced into labor, prevented from leaving the missions, and beaten. Many of them died from this mistreatment, from the brutal way they were treated, and from the diseases that the Spaniards brought with them. Despite this well-documented history of genocide, in 2015 Pope Francis decided to make Serra a saint, which brought a round of protests in California.
So it is amazing to me that a liquor company based in San Francisco would name their gin Junipero, whether or not they make a reference to the priest. Until very recently, there was a statue of Junípero Serra in San Francisco (it was torn down during the recent protests). Serra is the name of the main road that stretches through the Stanford University campus; the university’s official address is on Serra, though it is in the process of changing that to Jane Stanford Way. The first question Jill, also a native Californian, asked me when I told her the name of the gin that we’d be drinking: Was it was named after Junípero Serra? Neither the bottle of gin itself nor the marketing around it makes any reference to Junípero Serra, only the juniper notes of the gin, which seemed like an odd omission to me. The bottle and the marketing did, however, tout the new bottle design, which made me wonder why the name of the gin wasn’t up for reconsideration as well.
Both Jill and I thought the strong juniper notes of the gin worked well in a gin and tonic. I made them heavy on both the gin and on the lime juice, but we agreed that I needed to try the gin in other forms, especially in a Martini, to see how it tasted when it wasn’t masked by citrus and tonic.
So when I had a FaceTime happy hour with another friend, the writer Jami Attenberg, I pulled out my cocktail shaker and made a gin martini. Jami is one of those Twitter -friends-to-real-friends relationships I treasure. I followed her long ago because I loved her writing, and we’ve now met a number of times in person, back in the days when we all used to travel to other cities for work. I’m so grateful for my writer friends. In the way I don’t have to explain the nuances of my family to Jill, I don’t have to explain the highs and lows of publishing to other writers. We can talk in shorthand with one another about our joys and frustrations and sorrows, and give and receive helpful advice. Jami seemed like a good person to—at least virtually—share a Martini with, and this one was great: The briny olives I tossed in worked perfectly with the piney and peppery notes of the juniper, and both Martinis I drank during our conversation went down easily.
But I wanted to know more about how this gin combined in cocktails, so I went over to my mom’s so we could have French 75s. I assumed the strong flavor of the gin wouldn’t marry well with Champagne and simple syrup, but the lemon juice tied it all together and made for a delicious and balanced cocktail. We toasted to our recently departed and beloved family dog, Lucy, and talked about Junípero Serra, racism and Catholicism. My mom attends—as do I, only much less frequently—a wonderful Catholic church in Oakland whose priest has recently received widespread attention for his loud calls for the Catholic Church to listen to its Black parishioners. It will take a lot of work, but one thing we’ve all learned in 2020 is that change can happen very quickly. I have hope for the good kind of change to accompany the bad.
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