In our final "Fall" themed Wine Club, we're diving into wines that will sit happily on your Thanksgiving table. They will, of course, be delicious alone and with other meals as well, but I couldn't miss the opportunity do a Thanksgiving pairing for you all. The Thanksgiving meal is surprisingly easy to pair wines -- it's salty and fatty, without too many acidic factors and certainly no spice (heat spice) to speak of. Wine is there to enhance your the food on your plate, but it isn't necessarily the star of the show (though it can be)

TWO 

 

Julien Peyras
"Les Copains d'Aboard"
Grenache Blanc/Roussanne/Clairette
(Skin Contact)

Julien comes from a long line of vignerons but when he took over the vineyards in 2007 he began to work them without the use of chemical pesticides or fertilisers. Having previously sold his Cinsault, Syrah, Carignan and Grenache to the local cooperative he decided to start making and bottling wine himself. "The name of this cuvée—“Friends come first”—came about because, when I was starting off, I always said that I wanted to make wine to share great moments with friends. This is a little homage to that good old group of party animals!!" - The winemaker

Three-day maceration of Grenache blanc and Roussanne; direct press of Clairette. Light-bodied with pronounced acidity and minerality. Soft pineapple and pear notes. Lower alcohol and refined structure of the cuvée are the result of the cooler nights leading up to the 2021 harvest. This wine will be excellent with some of the fresher portions of the meal. There's enough acid to cut the fat of mashed potatoes, or complimentary the salt in your turkey. 

 

"Aurélien Petit was formerly married to Julie Brosselin of Les Cigales dans la Fourmilière and learned how to make zero-additive wine from her current partner Ivo Ferreira. They all live and work closely in a beautiful community of winemakers in Montpeyroux, France.  Petit started making wine in 2012 with two small parcels of vines split into several small parcels, which total just over 4.5 hectares and the vines are between 20 and 50 years old. He works with respect for the land, and all of his farming is done by hand along with his partner, Magali. No chemicals are ever used in the vineyards, indigenous yeasts are used exclusively during fermentation, and the wines are neither fined nor filtered with no added sulfites. Aurélian has a unique style of macerating/aging various grapes/plots separately, then blending them to taste. The red grape varieties here are typical of the Hérault: Carignan, Syrah, and Grenache. His white wines are Grenache Blanc (a rarity in this region), and Terret-Bourret, a once common grape variety in the Languedoc that is hardly grown anywhere else." -Bisou Bisou Wines (the importer)

This is a brand new producer to the United States, so you'll be some of the first to try the wines. 'Cyclope' feels like a quintessential southern french table wine. Sunny and ripe Carignan is the perfect Thanksgiving grape. Red fruit, lovely texture, very pleasant acid, but nothing overwhelming. The bottle will be empty before you know it.  

FOUR 

The inStabiles series of wines are, according to Arribas, free wines: individual releases ordered in a series by number and each receives its own subtitle. The wine itself is an opportunity for Arribas to free himself to experiment only within the confines of vintage and the origin of the fruit that include Morera, Torroja, and higher vineyards in Lloar. He sees each inStabile release as an exercise in assemblage, selecting from an array of unique methods and vessels available in his cellar. The unifying principle is navigating the wine trail itself by selecting wines that, when combined, evoke subtlety and weightlessness through craftwork.

'Claret' is a blend of red and white Grenache. The red grape component is largely rose (free run juice, which is literally the juice that flows from the cumulative weight of the grapes), with the white seeing several days of maceration (meaning orange wine, technically). It is aged in a blend of foudres (really big barrels) and glass. While the color of the wine flirts with being a dark rose, the experience of the wine is much more textural, clay like and complex. This unorthodox rose mirrors Alfredo Arribas’ departure from the expectations of Priorat, best known for making boozy, big reds. 

'Hadal': The hadal zone, also known as the hadopelagic zone, is the deepest region of the ocean, lying within oceanic trenches. The hadal zone ranges from around 6 to 11 km below sea level, and exists in long, narrow, topographic V-shaped depressions. Devin Meyers, the person behind Dorsal wines, is a character. He's a true romantic: no decision is ever made because it was simply convenient. He navigates through the world with artistry and intention. His wines are emblematic of his character: thoughtful, poetic and lovingly ephemeral. After years of jobs in rural Alaska, the poet/fisherman/naturalist became enamored with wine. Devin previously worked as Caleb Leisure’s assistant, before which he worked in Australia, for winemaker Sam Vinciullo. In 2020 he worked with Nic Coturri (son of famed Sonoma Mountain winemaker, Tony Coturri), when they moved to the San Juan Islands in Washington. This was a troubled harvest which ended abruptly when the vineyards all burned in the Oregon fires four days before harvest. In 2021 Devin began farming a vineyard in Grass Valley, in the Sierra Foothills, where almost all of his 2021 fruit came from.

This is the perfect Thanksgiving wine for the table. I hesitated to include another wine from a producer we've already featured, but this will is too well suited for Thanksgiving food, so I just had to. "It is a true field blend of the whole Smith vineyard in Grass Valley, Sierra Foothills, and a portrait of all 6 picks over the course of the 2021 Harvest. Cab rosè pressed over Muscat skins, Syrah Rosè, and then Syrah, Cab, Merlot & Primitivo with a three week rolling maceration co-fermenting. All 3 cuvées fermented separate and then were aged separate in stainless, blended into one wine in late spring. This is the deepest Dorsal yet, so lovely lively with refreshing vents of acidity and squinty salinity. Wine for exploring the Marianas Trench with. The Hadal Zone is the deepest zone in the ocean, where no sunlight hits, occurring mostly in the Pacific. Here the mysteries of life bat about, rain of marine debris inherent, verdant as an aching key." - Devin Meyers