Beaujolais-Villages is the best wine for Thanksgiving dinner crowd
The sweetness found in cranberry sauce, glazed ham and sweet potatoes calls for a lighter, softer and fruitier red wine.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/JXHMNN7TWRCSBLE5AZHKNKRURI.jpg)
If you’ve started your shopping for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, it’s hard to make a better choice than French Beaujolais-Villages for your red wine. Most reds taste stronger and drier and may well better suit your tastes on their own or with other foods. However, those same traits can be problematic alongside the sugary recipes we consider holiday classics. The ample sweetness found in the cranberry sauce and glazed ham calls for a lighter, softer, and fruitier red wine, as do grandma’s glazed carrots and candied sweet potatoes, which is precisely where this unusual style excels.
Beaujolais is located just north of France’s gastronomic capital of Lyon and is famous for its lightweight reds made using the gamay grape. Of the red wine grapes, gamay is an outlier with freakishly low levels of tannin, the antioxidant compound that gives both red wine and black tea their distinctive leathery mouthfeel. While the wines are not themselves sugary, they are also not too dry and deliver a vibrantly fruity riot of raspberry and strawberry flavors in each sip. This combination gives Beaujolais special appeal for multigenerational meals where folks who do not normally drink red wine at dinner may have a glass, from grad students to great-aunts. When shopping for these wines, though, it’s best to skip past those that simply say Beaujolais or Beaujolais Nouveau on the label, and seek out the superior appellation of Beaujolais-Villages. These wines may cost a couple dollars more, as with this example from the region’s largest vintner, but they consistently deliver far higher quality because their grapes may only be grown in the Beaujolais region’s best villages.
Georges DuBoeuf Beaujolais-Villages Beaujolais, France
$14.99; 13.5% alcohol
PLCB Item #7237
Sale price through 11/27 — regularly $16.99
Also available at these N.J. stores: Wine Warehouse in Clementon, $12.49, blackwood.winewarehousenj.com; Canal’s in Mount Ephraim, $13.49; mycanals.com; and Joe Canal’s in Lawrenceville, $14.99, lawrenceville.jcanals.com.