Have you ever bought a bottle of wine to complement the flavors in your evening meal? Or been offered a wine flight to accompany a prix fixe tasting menu? From the auberges of France to sommelier-curated meals, the concept of pairing drinks with food by matching flavor and texture profiles is popular and well-known. But when was the last time you looked up the best drink to go with…a book?

Amira K. Makansi, author of the forthcoming Literary Libations: What to Drink with What You Read wants you to do just that. As a hospitality professional and a former winemaker, Makansi’s goal is to merge two beloved pastimes—reading and drinking—into one delightful pairing. The subtitle is a riff on the iconic culinary reference book What to Drink with What You Eat, and Makansi uses the history and themes of famous books to provide humorous but informative drink pairing recommendations.

“I got the idea a few years ago when I was working at Peachy Canyon Winery in California,” she says. “I spent the whole day topping barrels, which can be mind-numbing work. To pass the time, I came up with wine pairings for genres of literature.” She lists two examples: Petite Sirah with suspense novels; rosé with romance. “When I got home, I turned the pairings into a blog post. It ended up being one of my most successful posts to that point.”

The pairings in Literary Libations are cheeky but thoughtful, and each is accompanied by a brief paragraph of explanation. Some pairings help to accentuate the book’s setting: California Zinfandel goes with The Grapes of Wrath, and Tempranillo from Spain’s Ribera del Duero goes with For Whom the Bell Tolls. Others are more humorous than anything: A Corpse Reviver cocktail accompanies Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (“Get it?” Amira ribs. “A corpse reviver?”) Some are connected through both theme and history: she pairs The Great Gatsby with a French 75—an elegant Prohibition cocktail that uses champagne and gin, both symbols of wealth and luxury. And what else but a Bloody Mary could go with Bram Stoker’s Dracula?

Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Makansi studied history at the University of Chicago and spent a year working in high-end restaurants in the Windy City before moving to the west coast to pursue winemaking. She discovered writing accidentally, she says, when her mother Kristina asked her and her sister Elena to collaborate on a story idea. That story became The Sowing, the first book in the Seeds trilogy, which has sold nearly 30,000 copies. In 2016, when they published the final book in the series, they announced that the film rights had been optioned by Big Picture Ranch, an Academy Award-nominated independent studio in Ojai, California.

The family collaboration didn’t end there. Elena Makansi, the younger of the two, contributed thirty-five watercolor illustrations to Literary Libations—including the one on the cover. Elena is an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and the sisters are very close.

Makansi moved to the Rogue Valley in June of 2017 when her partner, Vince Vidrine, accepted a winemaking position with Irvine & Roberts Vineyards. They moved together from McMinnville.

“I love it here,” Makansi says. “I’ve never felt so welcomed into a community as I have in the Rogue Valley.”

Literary Libations was released in September and is available for purchase at Bloomsbury Books and The Book Exchange in downtown Ashland and at Rebel Heart Books in Jacksonville. You can connect with Amira on her Facebook page at www.facebook.com/AmiraKMakansi, at her website www.thezaxis.co, or email her directly at amira.k.mak@gmail.com.