With Thanksgiving only a few days away, many of you may be wondering: “What wine should I drink with the turkey this year?”  Enter the French: Georges DuBoeuf  vs. Louis Latour in a Beaujolais-Villages showdown.  While this may not be the battle of the century, or even that hard-hitting of a fight (I haven’t met the pinot that was able to take me out), many would agree that a pinot noir is decent pairing for one of the largest turkey slayings of the year.  And with good reason.  The lighter style of the pinot is agreeable with most people’s palettes and pairs well with many of this holiday’s traditional dishes.

(I should note that both wines have been training since 2006 for this fight, and were allowed to breathe for one hour before consumption.)

Georges DuBoeuf: 2006 Beaujolais-Villages

While Georges’ offering appears to be the underdog of this battle with a floral-themed label, he has weighed in at a healthy $12 and has a nose that arguably smells of fresh-cut flowers, possibly even dandelions.  It’s a very light wine, with a quick finish that’s chased by a faint jab of citrus.

While I will openly admit that I tend to enjoy the heavyweight matches a little more, it’s always fun to see what the lightweights can bring to the table.

Louis Latour: 2006 Beaujolais-Villages

Also weighing in at a spry $12 is Latour’s offering, which has a wicked cranberry-right cross.  With a short, soft finish, this wine would also be a good choice for Thanksgiving dinner.  And this may be a ridiculous critique, but I would feel much better about bringing a bottle of Louis Latour’s Beaujolais-Villages to a gathering of friends and family, the bottle just screams old school French style.

The decision:

Latour by a knockout.  DuBoeuf simply lacked the refinement and experience that Latour brought to this match.  While both wines fell safely within the pinot style, Latour was a slightly heavier, more refined wine than the DuBoeuf.  And the DuBoeuf just felt young and unprepared for this battle.

Post-fight analysis:

At the end of the day, pairing wine with anything (especially Thanksgiving) just comes down to what you enjoy.  If you would enjoy a gin and tonic with your Thanksgiving dinner, then by all means, please enjoy a tumbler of your favorite.  And if you really worked at it, you could probably even convince me that it would be a reasonable pairing, as wild turkeys are often found roosting in pine trees.  While this may or may not be utter nonsense, I hope that it serves to prove my point - drink what you like and enjoy the company.  The holiday season is one of the few times a year that I get to raid my father’s cellar, and get away with it.

Happy Holidays!
-Ryan

Guest Review:

Armed with an exciting new recipe in hand, my wife and I tromped off to the grocery store to gather up the yummy ingredients in preparation for a hopefully nice meal. As is usually the case when we food shop together, I become impatient so I get my little assignments and scurry off to find items, only to return for a new assignment. My first stop was to get the wine! The meal actually called for a white, but my eye fixed on a wine produced, as it turns out, by one of the oldest wineries in the states, Concannon. I had never tasted any of their wines and for that matter never really heard about them. I’ll get to the wine itself later but I thought it interesting to share some info about the winery first. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, and of course the web site on the bottle, I found the winery and read thru the site to see what was what. Turns out, Concannon is celebrating 125 years of operation this year, the vines being planted by an Irish immigrant in 1883. Located in Livermore Valley , which is west of the San Francisco area, James Concannon figured that the grapes would flourish with warm days and cool nights, given winds moving inland from the adjacent bay. In life’s unending quest for knowledge, it is always refreshing to learn something interesting and somewhat obscure for strategic use later on. So I have neatly tucked away the fact that the Concannon Vineyard produced the worlds first Petit Syrah from its 1961 harvest, a wine they still produce today. So enough background info and, onto the wine. So I picked up a 2006 Pinot Noir, Limited Release, price $16. Packaged in a cool bottle with a trademark gate embossed on the bottle, I decanted it before sitting down to eat. While the professional tasting notes sport a long list of adjectives (as always), I caught dark fruit right away and a solid earthy aroma. The first glass was good but not great. We finished dinner and then sat on the couch to finish the bottle. The second glass was much better with a smoother finish and was far less biting than the first, indicating that maybe the wine is still a bit young and could be aged a bit longer. This wine would serve better paired with some nice grilled lamb chops and that will be the plan when I go back to cop a few more bottles.

-Scott

Concannon - 2006 Pinot Noir