WINE AND FOOD ADVICE FOR OUR 30th HOLIDAY SEASON
Let’s get a few things out of the way for starters:
- 85% of wine drinkers don’t bother to smell their wine before they down it.
- Most wine consumers couldn’t care less about finding wine harmony with what they eat. They’ll drink their favorite wine with anything, just like scotch drinkers.
- Most wine drinkers buy their wine where they buy their groceries.
- If you are reading this, you probably aren’t one of the above three categories.
People who take the trouble to visit a wine shop are already self-selected to seek out wines that are special, and a good wine store will offer wines where “special” doesn’t always mean “expensive.” Far from it.
Now that we’ve been thrust into the holiday season, there will be a lot of shoppers looking for gifts of wine, whether in gift basket form or a good bottle tucked into a cheerful bottle bag. We’ll also meet a lot of shoppers looking for specific types of wines to match up with the festive foods of the season, many of which we eat only at this time of the year.
One of the most wine-challenging meals of this or any year is a traditional Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving dinner: roast turkey, mashed potatoes, cornbread stuffing, turkey gravy, sweet-tart cranberry sauce, candied yams with or without marshmallows melted on top, perhaps a green bean casserole or creamed spinach soufflé, Waldorf salad (with or without more miniature marshmallows), and in more than a few homes, a cranberry-whipped cream Jello salad.
A caveat here. Many of our customers are eating other things for Thanksgiving, like roast leg of lamb, prime rib, ossobuco, pork loin, sushi or vegetarian fare. All of these are wonderful foods that can pair up with remarkable wines, but to be honest, you can dine with these things all year round. “Thanksgiving Wine” has no meaning at all if everything is on the table, so for purposes of this article, I’ll be talking about variations on the traditional Thanksgiving roast turkey meal.
I’ve been pairing food and wine for over 50 years; it’s been an obsession with me, finding wine that provide either harmony with what I’m eating or offers a complementary contrast. (This was a valuable lesson I learned from Laurence Faller, the late winemaker of Domaine Weinbach when she visited us for a tasting at The Wine Country.)
An example of harmony is a slice of breast meat turkey with a not-too-oaky Chardonnay, like turkey and turkey gravy harmonize with each other. A complementary contrast is an opposing flavor that works, for example, turkey breast and Beaujolais, like turkey and cranberry sauce. Both approaches are fine, with each taking the meal in its own direction.
The reason there are wine-killing traps in the traditional Thanksgiving meal is not the turkey—you can drink almost anything, red, white and rosé, with white meat, and a tad richer wines, red and white, with dark meat.
The wine killers are the fixings. Drinking a tart champagne, Loire Sauvignon Blanc or Italian Pinot Grigio with candied yams, butternut squash or anything else sweet, will hurt you, like a jump into a frozen lake. Or biting into a lemon. Instead, drink those wines before the meal as an aperitif.
If you are looking for harmony with yams and butternut squash, I prefer somewhat fruity white wine, like Alsace Pinot Gris and Loire Chenin Blanc like Vouvray and Montlouis with a tad of sweetness to avoid a shock to your system. For decades I turned to German Riesling labeled “Kabinett” or “Spätlese” because of their appley taste and refreshing acidity. You have to be careful these days, though, because the dominant trend in German winemaking is to make dry wines, and dry, tart, Riesling with sweet stuff will land you back in the frozen lake.
But none of this matters if you loathe these wines, so remember that the best guide for you is your own taste. The only thing I ask is to pay attention to the flavors in your mouth when you add wine to whatever else is in there. If the combination diminishes your wine, or has a reaction that is off-putting, make a note of it and don’t do it next year.
In my early wine years, I used Thanksgiving as an excuse to open prized red wines from Burgundy, and to this day I crave these wines at such a feast. Sadly, I’ve ruined those wines with a bite of sister-in-law’s marshmallow/Kool Whip fruit salad. A great red wine, such as a premier cru Burgundy, will shine with turkey alone, but I caution you to save that wine for your next prime rib if there are sweet components on your plate. The same advice goes for domestic Pinot Noir
If you must drink red wine, and I serve both red and white wines with Thanksgiving dinner, there is a reason Beaujolais keeps topping the list of suggestions. One reason, of course, is the release of Nouveau Beaujolais, the harvest year’s first offering in the Northern Hemisphere strategically planned worldwide for the Thursday before Thanksgiving. The freshness and gaiety and berry-like flavors provide the same complementary contrast that cranberries add to bland turkey meat.
Conventional Beaujolais (Old-veau?) is nearly always a fine match with Thanksgiving dinner, although the more concentrated and complicated flavors in Cru Beaujolais may be a bit too much. (Roast pork, on the other hand, just may be the ideal partner with Cru Beaujolais.)
Grenache, whose cherry-like flavors may survive the assaults of Thanksgiving foods, and Frappato from Sicily whose strawberry hints provide fruitiness, are two wildcards, but may end up being a tad too tart for this meal. You won’t know until you try.
What about Cabernet Sauvignon, America’s favorite prestige red, and its Old-World counterpart red Bordeaux, you ask? Bordeaux and mutton, Bordeaux and roast beef, Bordeaux and venison are fine, as long as the Bordeaux has been softened with a little age. California Cabernet these days has enough gooey fruit and lack of natural acidity to act like grape gravy with a turkey dinner, but, oh, the alcohol! Wines over 14% alcohol are not made to be paired with food.
What will I be drinking this holiday season? Probably a lot of champagne. I like starting every gathering with champagne. If someone hands me a cool seasonal cocktail, I’ll gladly imbibe that, too.
When it comes to dinner, I’ll select red and white wines like I always do, keying on the courses of the meal. And when it comes to turkey and the traditional fixings, all tables point to Beaujolais.
