Scandal’s Olivia Pope drinks expensive red wine. Lots of it.

Jennifer Cacicio explores wine’s role as a symbol of power, knowledge and family and why it’s become a key part of Kerry Washington’s character on the hit ABC show.

Writers have long been associated with drinking—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bukowski, Kerouac, Faulkner, Carver, Parker, Poe—but in addition to the decision a writer makes of what to drink while writing, there’s the subsequent question of what to have his or her characters drink. Hemingway’s protagonists have sipped everything from absinthe to vermouth; in Carver’s incredibly depressing (but so good) short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” the two couples drink so much gin they forget to go to dinner.