Written by: Eric Asimov, The New York Times
November 9, 2022
With all the tricky elements that go into creating the Thanksgiving feast, wine’s role can fade into the background trimmings with the pumpkins and ornamental corn.
Wrangling the turkey is the tough part. Organizing the stuffing and menu will be a challenge, while parceling out oven space for side dishes requires advanced techniques in both logistics and psychology.
Wine can seem an afterthought. That’s perfectly understandable, as selecting the bottles can be the simplest of chores, the easiest thing to cross off your list. Done with the most modest amount of consideration, wine will be the easiest step in your Thanksgiving preparation.
Yet, as wine sometimes is lost in the morass of more arduous tasks, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on its importance.
Elementally but crucially, wine is on the table to refresh, invigorate and delight. If your Thanksgiving is like mine has been historically, it will be a long, rewarding but tiring day. Good wine lightens the load, renews weary taste buds and reawakens the appetite.
Good wine additionally will enhance the food. Not in a fussy, matching-specific-bottles-to-particular-dishes sort of way. The holiday meal is too complicated for that. Unless your Thanksgiving meal mimics a small dinner party, forget about food-and-wine pairing. What’s important is to select bottles that will be versatile with all sorts of foods, that will offer such delicious bursts of energy that you can’t wait for another sip after the next bite.
Most important, though, and often lost in the discussion of which bottles to choose and how to serve them, is wine’s symbolic, ritualistic role in bringing people together and reaffirming social bonds.
Throughout history, from the Bible and in ancient winemaking cultures up through almost every ceremonial modern occasion, wine is what we drink. It’s wine that we pour to raise a glass, to look in one another’s eyes and to declare love, affection, trust and belief in the ties, whether familial or chosen, that hold us together. We drink to those born and to those who depart, and, regardless of the prevailing emotion, wine makes us feel closer to one another.
sn’t that what Thanksgiving is all about? Besides football and food comas, of course.
These are the reasons for giving wine a bit more than a passing thought in the Thanksgiving preparations. But it’s certainly not worth agonizing over. With a finite capacity for holiday problem-solving, let wine be the easiest part of your plan.
For almost 20 years, The Times’s Thanksgiving wine panel has been gathering for the sole purpose of helping you to wear the wine burden lightly. We hold an early holiday meal and drink a bunch of wines, not so much for the purpose of recommending specific bottles, although we have done so every year, but to demonstrate the sorts of wines that will work best with the feast. Those are the crucial details: not the bottles themselves but the characteristics that work best.
This year, the Food section’s old guard gathered — Florence Fabricant, Julia Moskin, Pete Wells and me — along with Victoria Taylor, the head sommelier at Bar Boulud, where we ate a meal that, if not a facsimile of the holiday spread, at least mimicked it well.
As always, the assignment was for each of us to bring two bottles, a white and a red, with each costing no more than $25. That price has not wavered since 2006, whether the economic picture looked sunny, depressed or inflated. Why? Because the range of $15 to $25 then and now represents the area of greatest value in wine, where you can find bottles that are not merely sound but that are both exciting and distinctive.
My assumption is that Thanksgiving will be a large, unruly party. Whether served at a single table or buffet style, the idea is to have plenty of wine. The number to keep in mind is one bottle per wine-drinking adult. That may sound like a lot. But it’s not a recommendation that everybody should drink an entire bottle. It’s simply a formula for not running out. Nothing kills the spirit of Thanksgiving generosity more than, “Sorry, that’s the last bottle.”
You’ll want both a white and a red. (As I said, this is not the time for food pairings.) Make them both available from the start and have plenty of each. If you want to supplement with sparkling wine, rosé, orange wine or anything else, that’s fine. But supply the basics.
Similarly, do not worry about glassware. If you have enough wine glasses of whatever shape and size, that’s great. Give each drinker a glass and allow them to reuse it no matter which color or what bottle they are pouring. Not enough glasses? Use tumblers or juice glasses.
The only thing to avoid are single-use plastic glasses: They are an environmental disaster. If you need to use plastic, many reusable options are out there. Govino, for one, makes excellent reusable stemless glasses that will last through many large gatherings.
The only exception to this advice? If you are having a small Thanksgiving, say, eight or fewer, treat it like a dinner party, breaking out whichever bottles you prefer in your best glasses, with different wines for each course, as you like.
While the wine panel excels at selecting wines, it is less diligent about following the guidelines. Instead of bringing a red and a white, Julia decided to bring two reds, she said, because she could not find an interesting white. And Pete’s white was an orange wine, so-called because it’s a white made using the techniques for making a red, in which the grape juice soaks with the pigment-bearing skins, yielding an amber, sometimes rosy color and, depending on how long they’ve macerated, possibly a tannic texture.
Even if the balance among our 10 selections was a bit off, they still represented the sorts of wines that shine with the Thanksgiving feast. These wines are light on their feet and agile, moderate in alcohol with plenty of lively acidity and little baggage, like undue oakiness or chunky tannins, which can make them less refreshing.
Pete’s orange wine, the 2020 Field Recordings Skins from the Central Coast of California, was our favorite among the whites. The prolonged contact of the grape skins with the juice can sometimes make an orange wine quite tannic, which can be fascinating — though not in the context of Thanksgiving. But this bottle, a blend mostly of chenin blanc and pinot gris, was fresh and lively, with spicy floral flavors and just a touch of a tannic rasp for textural interest.
Almost imperceptibly behind was Florence’s white, a 2018 Finger Lakes dry riesling from Empire Estate. I loved this wine. It was dry and textured, with a pebbly mineral quality that made me want to keep drinking it. But Julia felt it was a bit syrupy and wondered whether it would be tiring to drink.
The second tier of whites included mine, a 2021 Apremont from Anne and Sylvain Liotard’s Domaine des 13 Lunes in the Savoie region of France. I loved this wine, too. It was fresh and lively, and with just 10 percent alcohol I could drink this all night. Victoria liked it as well. But others wondered if it had the weight to last through the meal. Julia said it was “best for greeting people at the door.”
Victoria’s white, a 2019 Sambrena Toscana Bianco from Tenuta La Novella, was, like mine, a light, refreshing white that was not as distinctive as the two top whites. In a reverse from the Field Recordings orange wine, this wine was 50 percent sangiovese, a red grape, which was handled with white wine techniques, whisked quickly off the skins and blended with other white varieties. It was quite likable.
Our reds were all superb. Pete also brought our favorite, a 2020 Les Terrasses Chinon from Beatrice & Pascal Lambert. It was entirely cabernet franc, and combined a savory lightness with complexity that made it a pleasure to drink.
I put my own red next because of the added value of coming in a liter bottle. It was the 2021 Boutanche from Broc Cellars, a blend of primarily zinfandel with carignan and valdiguié — spicy, smoky and herbal yet easygoing and thirst-quenching. It, too, was an ideal Thanksgiving red and proved that zinfandel, which is often recommended for Thanksgiving but is too often highly alcoholic and overbearing, can be wonderfully attractive at 13 percent alcohol rather than 15 percent.
Our No. 2 red was just as good. It was the 2020 Cooper Hill pinot noir from Cooper Mountain Vineyards, one of two Oregon pinot noirs that Julia brought. It was pretty, floral and complex with what Pete called a “savory, salty edge.”
Julia’s other pinot noir, a 2020 Primarius, which includes grapes from southern Oregon as well as the Willamette, was spicy, meaty and easy to drink, though Victoria called it “brooding and autumnal.” Victoria’s wine, a 2020 Savoie from Charles Gonnet made of the mondeuse grape, was spicy and herbal with a touch of umami. I very much enjoyed it, though Pete thought it might be a touch too tannic for the long haul.
Florence’s red, like her white, was from the Finger Lakes, a 2019 blaufränkisch from Terrassen. It was bright and fresh, soft, juicy and refreshing, ideal to me though Florence herself called it “backgroundy.”
Any of these bottles would be great. So would dozens of other choices — Beaujolais, chenin blanc, sauvignon blanc, good rosés — it’s hard to go wrong so long as you stay with the guidelines of lively acidity and moderate alcohol. You could consult past Thanksgiving columns for additional ideas.
Even if you stray, it’s still wine. You’ve got great food and most importantly, you’ve got each other.
Tasting Notes
Whites
★★½ Anne & Sylvain Liotard Domaine des 13 Lunes Apremont 2021, 10 percent, $22
This alpine wine, made entirely of the jaquère grape, was as fresh and lively as a mountain stream. Great for a long, tiring meal, but some felt it was no more than pleasant, at its best as an aperitif. (Wine Traditions, Falls Church, Va.)
Click here to read the original article
