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Wines for Thanksgiving? Go young, young man, and Go Riesling!
From Joe Appel’s wine column in Portland Press Herald, November 17, 2010
More related content, and commentary, and other good wine stuff, is at Joe Appel’s own blog, Soul of Wine.
Most conversations about Thanksgiving wines are unrealistic. They presuppose a coven of wine geeks sitting quietly around a table parsing the nuances of how this or that Gewurztraminer pairs with someone’s aunt’s candied sweet potatoes.
Probably quite well, but in reality there are a lot of people in the house and most of them are just pounding (wine, if you’re lucky). And their plates are filled with so many competing flavors that trying to match the wine to the meal is folly.
Just provide many different wines and let guests choose for themselves. The wines should be inexpensive, since, let’s face it, you’re going to die a thousand deaths if you have to watch someone guzzle something pricey with heedless abandon.
When there’s variety and no sequence instructions (“Drink the Cava with the pigs-in-blankets, Mom!”), folks experiment more, and better spontaneous conversations arise.
With a lots-of-different-bottles approach, adhere to some general principles:
• Have a mix of white, rosé, sparkling and red. More of the first three, less of the latter.
• Emphasize freshness, brightness, minerality and vitality rather than seriousness, age, earth and heft. You’re going to be in a warm house for many hours, eating and drinking a lot. You don’t (I’m guessing) want to pass out or even spend the day oblivious. You don’t want to slaughter the food with wines better suited for red meats and aged cheeses.
• Therefore, choose low-alcohol wines. Twelve percent or less.
• No oak. Wines aged in oak, generally, are heftier and more egotistical, and so require more care in pairing. They also happen to match poorly with traditional Thanksgiving foods.
• The traditional foods have a good deal of sweetness, which will be set off nicely by wines that have bright fruit, and a little sweetness themselves married to substantial acidity. (Acidity is what will cut the copious fat, viscosity and “oomph” of gravy, stuffing and potatoes. Along with young-wine fruit, quenching acidity will also compensate for overly dry turkey.) The sweetness is key: bone-dry wines will inject a sour, unthankful quality you don’t want anywhere near these foods or this day.
• The above principles favor certain grapes. For whites: Riesling, Gewürztraminer, Pinot blanc, Pinot gris, Grüner Veltliner, Chenin Blanc, Sylvaner, Scheurebe and sparkling wines such as Prosecco and Cava. For reds, Gamay (Beaujolais or not), Pinot noir, Zweigelt, young Barbera and St. Laurent.
Pardon the brevity of the descriptions. I hope they’re enough to pique curiosity; the wines are all spectacular.
Off-dry whites: Wallace Brook Pinot Gris ($9, National), fragrant, sharp, multifaceted; HighDef Riesling ($11, SoPo), friendly, succulent, racy; Darting Riesling Kabinett ($17 liter, SoPo), spicy, gingery; Turckheim Pinot Blanc d’Alsace ($13, Nappi), luscious, floral, focused. St. Urbans-Hof Rieslings are terrific, slate-y and dialed-in values as well (Central). Wanna splurge? Leitz Magdalenenkreuz Riesling Spätlese ($22, SoPo). (Other Leitz wines are also amazing, some lower-priced).
Exotic whites: Thomas Halby Gewürztraminer ($9, Wicked) or Robertson Gewürztraminer ($9, Davine); both are tropical and all-directions, slightly spicy and plain ol’ fun. Going big: Abbazia di Novacella Gewürztraminer ($26, Pine State), an otherworldly, joyously complicated but balanced-on-rails Gewurz.
Chenin Blanc, perfect. Dry Creek ($9, Pine State) is Californian but actually tastes like Chenin (bright, touch of earth, honey). La Craie Vouvray ($15, Central) is revelatory: chalky, grippy and singsong, with more of that honey that’s right on for herbed turkey and stuffing.
Reds: Several of my favorites are wines I’ve written about previously: Sa Ra Da ($10, Wicked) is zesty, medium-bodied and full of young fruit. Chaponne Morgon ($15, Pine State) is Cru Beaujolais leaping with berries. Zweigelt is a no-brainer grape for Thanksgiving. Some of the best around are the Huber ($15 listed, though cheaper at most places right now, SoPo) and Berger ($14 liter, SoPo).
Pinot noir is great, although often thin at lower prices. Domaine des Remparts ($16, Nappi) is 3-D, with cherries on top. Try German and Austrian Pinots wherever you find them; the combination of cherries, cranberries and fat screams for turkey and game, nowhere better than in Messmer Spätburgunder ($19, SoPo). Shakespeare drank Spätburgunder (really).
Sparkling wines are happy, clear-eyed accompaniments to the Thanksgiving table. Juve y Camps Reserva Cava ($14, National) is clean, frank and rounded, with perfect effervescence. You already have a favorite Prosecco; go with it. Louis de Grenelle Corail Rosé ($20, Central) is the dry, extrapolated essence of Thanksgiving-food-friendly Cabernet Franc. Von Schleinitz Sekt ($30, SoPo) is sparkling Riesling, two of the greatest words in any language, from a spectacular winemaker (who also makes cheaper, wonderful still wines).
Kinda cheesy: Sat fats, Nourishing Traditions, real food
Provocative article in New York Times last week about how an industry-promoting arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is pushing more and more cheese consumption, even as the USDA itself (urged on by all sorts of health and anti-obesity groups nationwide) is trying to get Americans to eat less saturated fat. The industry arm, Dairy Management, paid $12 million (that’s taxpayer money, natch) to devise and implement an advertising campaign for Domino’s Pizza — among a lot of other unseemly things.
So, yeah, we’ve heard that story before: Government is hypocritical, and our farm and health policies are managed by big corporations and support their interests only. Yes. Agreed.
But it’s worth mentioning that the Times article takes at face value the assumption that consumption of saturated fat has been unequivocally linked to heart disease. Whereas the truth is that the science on that is pretty shaky: The studies that support such conclusions do not sufficiently account for other lifestyle/diet factors.
I’m not saying, “Eat as much cheese and saturated fat as you like.” I am urging people who eat a generally healthy diet to include saturated fat in their meals, as they are in part responsible for transmitting the full nutrient value of vegetables and other foods to your system. What’s paramount is the right balance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids. That balance is maintained in animal fats (cheese, full-fat milk, butter, and also animal flesh; extra-virgin olive oil places close second), while it’s out of whack (too much Omega-6) in so-called “healthy” fats such as canola oil.
In my own experiences with various diets (vegan, vegetarian, omnivorous, macrobiotic, Ayurvedic), my health, balance and well-being have been best maintained by inclusion of significant saturated fats that derive from clean, all-natural sources. This means that cheese on a Domino’s extra-cheese pizza (indeed, the Times article shows that Domino’s normal pizza now has a lot more cheese than it used to) is not the way to go. Instead, eat cheese made from cows you know were raised right, feeding on grass if possible. You may want to experiment with raw milk for straight consumption as well as for your cheese consumption. I know that my digestive system is taxed by pasteurized dairy much more than it is by raw.
For what it’s worth, Rosemont‘s kitchen does not use canola and other imbalanced oils. We sell a broad variety of healthy saturated fats: all-natural meats from calmly raised animals, raw dairy from several local producers, and more.
Also, this is not one-size-fits-all. I’m skinny, am generally in good health, and metabolize quickly. If you are overweight or have high cholesterol, or simply feel terrible after eating cheese or using butter, don’t use those ingredients!
As always, trust your own body, and do the real research (rather than sharing the assumptions of the New York Times). For starters, you might want to check out the work of Sally Fallon (her book is “Nourishing Traditions”) and the Weston Price Foundation. If you do, make sure you don’t start taking that at face value. Triangulate all information with your own experience and conversations with friends (whose body needs may differ from yours and therefore can provide more insight).
Does Two Buck Chuck Suck?
Er…maybe. Read on (from Joe Appel’s Portland Press Herald wine column this week):
When I first started writing this column, an industry buddy who’d previously written about wine gave me a few guidelines, one of which was never to slam any wines. There’s little point in harsh criticism, the thinking goes, since the purpose of a wine column is to get people to consume wines, and there are plenty of good ones to praise.
I agree. Wine is a harmless enough sphere of existence that it’s not as if there are evil bottles out there waiting to attack and it’s my duty to protect you from them. Bad wines ought to slink into ignominy through the disdain of omission rather than public assault.
But the game changes when a bad wine comes attached to a hype machine so smiley-faced, so graced by universal acquiescence to its imperial clothes-lessness, that someone’s gotta stand up and launch a pebble from his slingshot.
Two-buck Chuck costs closer to three dollars these days. Trader Joe’s legendary house wine, the Charles Shaw line, is $2.59 plus tax and deposit. I picked up six bottles (one of each putative varietal), and walked out five minutes later with a $17.22 credit card receipt. Not a lot of money — but not a bargain either. (Summary of the wines themselves: blandly fine, no finish whatsoever; the whites significantly less pleasant than the reds.) But of course, discussing the nuances of these wines would be ridiculous. They’re for drinking not thinking and the price is right. Right?
The price is, but not the cost. That might sound needlessly complicated, since the issue of cost is whether it’s low enough for a given consumer to afford a given product. And it’s easy for me to complicate this issue given the primary perk of my job: copious sample bottles. (I really do still buy wine for myself, but I get to drink plenty of wine without paying for it.)
Yeah, the fact is that a lot of people want to enjoy a glass with dinner without having to pay a lot for it. Shaw wines are helpful in such situations.
Yet. Yet there are hidden costs. The biggest one is a general dumbing down of the wine market. I know everyone’s shopping Trader Joe’s exclusively right now, but next time you feel the need for an edible vegetable, head over to any other Portland-area supermarket and note the changes in the wine departments. See?
Everyone’s racing to the bottom, all desperate to offer an alternative to $3 Chuck. The interesting bottles lose their shelf space, taken over by more and more case stacks of faceless, automaton wine engineered to move. (Trader Joe’s sells Shaw wine for nine cents above cost, and the few other wines they sell are significantly higher-priced than at other stores; it’s all about volume, baby.)
Wine is an agricultural product. It comes from the ground, the rain, the sun. It is midwifed into existence by human beings using tools. It is then put in bottles, packaged and shipped all over the world as an expression of that particular grape, place and time.
There simply is no honest way to charge a customer $2.59 for all that work and raw material. Too much has to be sacrificed — labor conditions, ecological viability, market diversity — and too much has to be shuffled around via point-of-sale loss-leaders. It’s wine as Ponzi Scheme. If the culture is shifting toward more transparency and sustainability in food and commerce, Shaw is out of step.
Still, you should try the wines. What’s to lose? And you might like them. The Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz are refreshingly medium-bodied and low-alcohol, with bright red fruit — and, in the latter’s case, a nice spice at the end. I wanted to dislike the wines themselves, but I can’t. (Actually, the Sauvignon Blanc is wretched.)
You can’t dislike something laboratory-bred to be inoffensive. You can’t dislike something with no soul. But you can feel swindled by the process. You can feel anxious and impotent in the face of market forces darker and more underground than you can grasp calling the plays.
You can well, you can just end up so sad that it’s all come to this: all the potential mystery, craft, romance, spirit and ecstasy of the thing (purchasable at true low cost, as I try to show in other columns), whittled down to a marketing concept.
Joe Appel’s day job is doing lots of different things at Rosemont Market and Bakery. His blog, soulofwine.com, continues the conversation, and he can be reached at soulofwine.appel@gmail.com
NEWS…in a letter!
| FROM OUR LATEST NEWSLETTER (sign up at website if you don’t already get it) |
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Start thinking — softly, calmly — about that special Thursday 2.5 weeks hence. We’ve got our special-order system in place at all three stores, and encourage you to sign up now or soon for turkeys, pies and cakes, rolls and more. More information will be posted in the coming days. Meanwhile, please ask our staff for any guidance you need.
Of course, if you wanna go rogue (sorry, bad timing on that phrase) with your meal planning and have some special ideas in mind, we’re here for you. We can order obscure fowl, special meats and more.
Rosemont will also have the best produce, from Maine and away, for your Thanksgiving table: local cranberries, root veggies of all kinds, fancy mushrooms, winter squash, Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes (thanks, Louisiana) and more. If there’s something you want that you don’t see, ask! For all your meals before and after November 25, consider our new butcher and fish departments at the Brighton store. Jared, our custom butcher, keeps turning out outrageously skilled and beautiful cuts, from locally and naturally raised animals. The entrecôte of beef (with olives, garlic and herbs), house-made Merguez sausage, turbot and Coho salmon look especially fine right now — but that’s right now; tomorrow it’ll be something else! |
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WINE NEWS!
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 Events! |
| Lots of ’em, in fact. Hold on to your hats, here we go: · Friday, November 12, 4-7 p.m. Munjoy Hill store: Wine tasting with Chris Campbell of C & P Wines. The most exciting Spanish wines we know of. You’ll love Chris. · Saturday, November 13, 12-2 p.m. Brighton Avenue store: Olive oil tasting with Shafiq Malouf of The Olive Harvest. How often do you get to do this? Then stick around for… · the same day and place, Saturday, November 13, 3-6 p.m. Brighton Avenue store: Wine tasting with Ned Swain of Devenish Wines. His voicemail announces whom you’re leaving a message for: “wine geek and adventurer”. That’s Ned. He’s so cute. He will show all French wines that meet at the intersection of geek, cute, and adventure (and awesome). · Dry out, then come on back Friday, November 19, 4-7 p.m. Brighton Avenue store, for a Wine tasting with Michael Burke of Vias Wines. Michael will bring the most stylish Italian wines imaginable, unimaginably stylishly. |
Bobby Kacher brings it for real
From Rosemont’s Joe Appel, his latest Portland Press Herald wine column. This is all about a Rosemont hero, Bobby Kacher, whose dedication to real, human-scale wine, made with love and by hand, is an inspiration to us all. He imports immense (but balanced) Châteauneuf-du-Papes and other artworks, but we really love the humbler wines he brings in — for $10 or so, for everyday when you live committed to making every day beautiful and real.
Note that Bobby Kacher himself will be in Portland Friday, November 12, to host a wine dinner for the public at Havana South. It’s only $69!
Appel on Wine: Bobby Kacher on heart, soul, hands, land, and wine
“We don’t always realize our potential,” Bobby Kacher says. “Great terroir has the potential it has, and it’s our job to bring it out. But we’re all born with a certain potential, just like terroir.” It’s a tremendously resonant statement from a tremendously important person in the world of wine, and it signifies the complex interrelationship Kacher sees among place, people and wine.
Kacher imports monumental wines from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Alsace, Burgundy and elsewhere, but his everyday wines light up my heart because they bear no trace of boredom, mass-production, or afterthought, and there simply are no better wines I know of in the $10-15 range. To buy some Top-40-hit of a $12 wine from your local Vino-Mart when there are Kacher wines to be had is borderline-criminally ignorant.
“I’ve always wanted to be judged on my basic level,” he told me. “In some ways there’s more work there, it’s more interesting, because the microclimates aren’t as rarefied.” His winemakers agree: “When you stand in André Brunel’s cellar,” Kacher said, “and taste his VdP (‘country wine’) Grenache and then his Châteauneuf, you really think, ‘Do I see a $50 difference?’ The great growers are going to make great wine at all levels. It’s in their blood, their skin, their DNA. He was trained to make noble wine, so he’s going to apply what he knows – what he is – to every wine he makes.”
The Brunel Grenache VdP Vaucluse 2008, is $10! A 3-D model of the real Provence, it’s unfiltered, dusty but super restrained. Unlike too much overly jammy, off-kilter modern Grenache, the fruit is so well-integrated and graceful, with an evening-soft finish, violets and lilacs (and Red Twizzlers). It’s $10! It’s $10!
Since the early 1970s, when like fellow independent-minded wine importers Kermit Lynch and Neal Rosenthal he hit the back-roads of France in search of The Real, Kacher has been bringing natural, handmade, character-laden wines to these shores.
The Gournier Merlot is another example of an inexpensive wine showing individuality and presence way beyond its price ($11). This is true-blue Merlot in unfiltered, walnuts-and-cocoa glory, spackled with a little mud. The overly rounded-off quality of modern Merlot that allowed “Sideways” to give it such a bad name is absent here, revealing the pepper, violets and life at the varietal’s core. It’s back-of-the-barn stuff, but graceful still. The 2007 I tasted recently was day-um fresh; the now-available 2009 must be stunning.
Of that wine Kacher told me, “I’ve put the Gournier in decanters after a few years of ageing and served it to friends, with food that has garlic, thyme, rosemary, and it’s amazing how people react…they see all kinds of complexity.”
He often does that at home, since “It matters so much to me that the consumer has a good experience at table when they pour one of my bottles. I often serve a simple Ugni Blanc at home without showing the bottle, and they think it’s a grand Sauvignon blanc.”
Ugni Blanc, the main grape in Armagnac, is most of the Domaine de Pouy 2009. This is just easy, bright, fresh white wine, as sharp as broken glass and that exciting, rippling with ricocheting citrus. With 10.5% alcohol and some pétillance, it’ll gobble up clean, direct foods from oysters to sautéed greens. Ten bucks.
A much weightier, wealthier white is the Becassonne 2009, a white Côtes du Rhône ($15-16) that drives deeper every sip. Deep almonds, almost frangipane, and earthy to the core. For winter fare like mushrooms, beans, smoked things, saffron and cream, this is what you want. Dazzling finish.
One more: Le Clos 2008. A blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Carignan and Grenache, it is the perfect everyday balanced red wine, for $12. It’s peppery, rustic, granular, angular, above all human wine. Soft tannins hang out in the back with the plummy fruit, maintaining order. Human: all the action moves analog and integrated, not robotic. For heart-filled foods: lentils, caramelized onions, stew. From the same Domaine, the Corbières 2007 costs an extra dollar and brings a foresty spirit: Let it breathe for 30 minutes or more and the fruit comes together in extraordinary ways, turning in the end to something like roasted beets. It kicks at first, then becomes stately.
Joe Appel’s day job is doing lots of different things at Rosemont Market and Bakery. His blog, soulofwine.com, continues the conversation, and he can be reached at: soulofwine.appel@gmail.com.
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