Thanksgiving Wines and a Nouveau Tasting
Just drink what you like – but here's what I'm drinking this week
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Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I mean, what’s not to love? Good food, good wine, and good friends — all without any pressure to buy gifts.
I’ve written plenty over the years about Thanksgiving wine pairings, so I’ll keep it short here: drink what you want. No matter what various magazines or writers try to tell you, the “perfect Thanksgiving wine” doesn’t exist.
Want to read a bit more of what I have to say on the matter? Read this story I did in 2015 and may redo in 2025.
My wife and I host Thanksgiving at our house, but now that it’s a bit harder for my family to travel here, it’s typically just the four of us for dinner. But for several years now, we have invited a bunch of our friends to stop by for appetizers and a drink in the early afternoon on their way to their respective dinners. It’s one of my favorite things we do. It’s a tradition now.
The group is varied in their wine tastes, so there will be a plethora of East Coast wines open for that, but for dinner, the wines pictured above are what I’ve pulled:
Trestle Thirty-One 2023 Rosé
Stranger Wine Company 2023 Carbonic Pinot Noir
Rosemont of Virginia 2023 Rosé
Macari Vineyards 2023 “Meadowlark” Cabernet Franc
The common themes? Freshness, no new oak, and fruity-savory balance. If you like richer or oakier wines, do it. Like affordable pinot grio from a box? That’s cool too.
Another Thanksgiving Tradition: Wine Tasting With Carlo
If you’ve been following my work for any period of time, you probably already know my good friend Carlo DeVito. He’s an extreme multi-hyphenate in the beverage world and beyond. He writes books about whiskey, about wine, and about historical figures (real and fictional). He used to own a winery in the Hudson Valley. He’s worked as a winemaker in New Jersey after selling that winery.
He lives in the Hudson Valley but has family here on Long Island, so he usually finds himself in the neighborhood at some point during Thanksgiving week. It may or may not have something to do with my wife’s stellar turkey pot pie that we always have the Friday after Thanksgiving.
We always taste (and drink) wine together when he’s in town. This year, we’re going to be tasting as many East Coast nouveau-style wines as we can get our hands on, including the two pictured above — Modales Wines 2024 Nouveau (a blend of zweigelt and pinot noir) and Loew Vineyards 2024 Nouveau (made using barbera).
Carlo and I are chasing down a few more this week — but if you have heard about other East Coast producers who made nouveau this year, please let me know!
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*sample submitted by winery
In the early '80s I made a nouveau Leon Millot by strict 𝑚𝑎𝑐𝑒́𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑞𝑢𝑒. We then had a blind tasting of all the nouveaus available in Kansas City, French and domestic, attended by a couple dozen of the city's top industry pros. The Leon won. It's certainly as good as gamay in the role.
The dumb thing was, BATF wouldn't let me put "carbonic maceration" on the label because they said it would confuse consumers. Wow, early days, non? Things have changed in 40 years.