The Annual Turkey Panic Tasting Schedule
As my regular reader knows, I’m not obsessive about matching food and wine. Last summer I paired seared scallops with a Pahlmeyer red. It was great, by the way, even if the mere thought of it would give any decent sommelier the vapors.
There’s nothing that throws the obsessive-about-food-matches crowd into a tizzy like Thanksgiving. Everybody in the world, it seems, dreads making a wine faux pas that will brand them forever as some kind of rube. Every wine magazine, every wine website, and every wine bore is out there right now with their opinions about the proper sort of wine to serve with Thanksgiving dinner. A quick perusal of magazines and websites indicates that Pinot Noir is once again the default wine, but that Gewurztraminer and Zinfandel are coming on strong.
Again: I don’t really care. Still, I understand that some of you worry about stuff like this. For you, there is salvation. For you, there are a couple of tastings in which local wine smarties put forth candidates for your table.
Relief — or, perhaps, therapy — begins Thursday, November 5, when Westport Whiskey & Wine’s open bottle night gives itself over to the annual Thanksgiving wine panic. You can go and sample and ask around, and while you taste you can imagine what your pompous Uncle Worthington will say as he sniffs and swishes between Bobcat-sized bites of candied vegetables and sticky-sweet starch. Open bottle night costs $10 and runs from 6:30 – 8:30.
If you miss that — if you need a do-over or just a support group of people who are suffering as you are — on November 17, from 4:30 – 6:30, The Wine Market will put forth its own slate of Thanksgiving candidates. They’re very nice people and they’ll listen to your concerns and take them seriously, even if I don’t, exactly.
I, personally, think when you’re feeding your deadbeat relatives they have exactly no moral basis on which to judge the wine you’re providing. The point of the exercise is to give thanks for providential bounty and enjoy people you don’t see all that often. With that in mind, I offer two low-intensity Thanksgiving wine strategies:
The easier of the two is to load-up on sparkling wines and screw the whole concept of matching anything with anything else. A couple of cases of inexpensive Cava or some other methode champenoise bubbly and your guests will be giving thanks, all right, probably in something approximating harmony.
The other strategy involves opening a bunch of different wines and letting people sort it out for themselves. The marshmallow-topped-sweet-potato crowd can go one way, the plate-filled-with-salty-stuffing crowd can go the other. If a trend develops, open more of that wine and leave the fretting to other people.
The stress reduction alone would seem reason enough to give thanks.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:35 AM
We always have sparkling wines on Thanksgiving Day. Start early, toasting the cook, welcoming the guests, sharing the meal, playing games with extended family & friends and even saying goodnight. Always a bottle of Schramsberg & definitely something from Champagne, Clicquot or Bollinger preferred.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:37 AM
PS – as we say at the store, drink what you like & play with your food to find the right match
November 10th, 2009 at 11:22 AM
My mother told me not to play with my food.
November 28th, 2009 at 5:38 PM
Hello , it’s Thanksgiving Day! I’m happy with my extra day off, and I am planning to doing something fun that will probably involve a moto trip and seeing something new in Reno I haven’t seen yet.
You write something new at Thanksgiving?