Four Wine Recommendations for Your Thanksgiving
It’s five o’clock on November 19th in my neck of the woods, and it’s not too late to order wine for the big dinner—what many Europeans, with a wink, call “the American Christmas.” I placed an order myself just today (Wednesday); it will be here Friday, with days to spare. Allow me four suggestions—international wines to bring a touch of delicious irony to your very American Thanksgiving table.
I’ve been leaning toward lighter wines lately. The heaviest red here sits politely at 13.5%, the Pinot at a featherweight 12.5%. The Torrontés, however, is the voluptuous one of the bunch at 13%—plush for a white, but worth every drop.
Kuentz-Bas, Crémant d’Alsace, Brut, France, 12%, $28 — Buy here.
Bubbly. There’s elegant, ephemeral sparkling wine . . . that’s mostly tasteless (Chandon or Mumm that starts every party?)—and then there’s sparkling wine you’ll get up and dance on the table to get the chance to drink. This Crémant from Alsace is firmly in the latter camp. Kuentz-Bas is an old estate in the fairytale hamlet of Husseren-les-Châteaux (we’ll return to them for a Pinot Noir). Their Brut compresses autumn into a glass. Toasty richness from lees aging wraps around delicate notes of honey, nectarine, and apple cider. The blend—Pinot Blanc and the rarely-spoken-of Pinot Auxerrois—feels like discovering a secret Alsatian country inn.
Bodega Colomé, Torrontés, Argentina, 13%, $11 — Buy here.
White. All four of these bottles are gentle on the wallet, but none more than this little wonder from Colomé, which practically jumped into my cart for $10.97. I return to this wine every year because no other white quite captures the joy the way Colomé Torrontés does. Rose petal at the start, nutmeg on the finish—it’s a wine that dances between freshness and fullness, making it a remarkably flexible partner for cheese, turkey, stuffing, even pie.
Kuentz-Bas, Pinot Noir, France, 2024, 12.5%, $28 — Buy here.
Red #1. Kuentz-Bas seems incapable of producing a wine that isn’t quietly magical. Importer Kermit Lynch puts it simply: you won’t find a better value—or a better introduction—to Alsatian Pinot Noir. The 2024 is drinking beautifully. Alsace isn’t Burgundy; perhaps that’s why this Pinot is so transparent and pure, like listening to Bach’s first cello suite played alone in a sunlit room. Simplicity that opens the heart while leaving the mind contemplating the experience. Earth, leaves, light, breath—everything direct, everything raw, everything essential.
Château Bernadotte, Haut-Médoc, Bordeaux, France, 2018, 13.5%, $21 — Buy here. (Also check your local wine store. That’s where I found mine.)
Red #2. There is something about winter’s approach that draws me toward Bordeaux—the need for fortification, yes, but also the need for poetry. I opened a bottle of the 2018 Bernadotte last week, and it’s royal flavor has lingered in my mind ever since. (The winery is named after the royal family of Sweden.) James Suckling notes blackcurrants, olives, dried herbs, smoke, and charred wood, with firm, fine-grained tannins. I’d add this: Bordeaux is the wine of late night solitude, after the plates have been scraped, the candles have guttered, the guests have wandered off to bed.
Picture yourself in a wingback chair, tucked into a paneled corner of a London club no one admits belonging to. Now is the hour to open that philosophy article you’ve been meaning to read—or the New Yorker piece on Gaudí’s La Sagrada Família. This Bordeaux will uncork a kind of tender clarity in your heart, and perhaps the gentle ache of nostalgia as another year tilts toward its end.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Theral