So what wine did Miles Standish and friends have at the first Thanksgiving?
There’s no record of a sommelier on the Mayflower, nor is there is any record of the menu and wine pairings. It’s thought that the first Thanksgiving menu featured native game, namely venison and wildfowl, as well as codfish and bass, accompanied by corn porridge or cornbread.
Good wine pairings for venison are Grenache, Zinfandel or Oregon Pinot Noir – flavors of dark fruit with low tannins. However, our Thanksgiving meals nowadays mostly feature commercially raised turkey and/or ham. Turkey is easy to pair since it’s a very mild flavor, but ham is more of a challenge, pairing best with white wines with higher acidity, such as Riesling. So, for a roast turkey, go for a light red wine, such as Pinot Noir, Beaujolais or Chianti, or a white such as Chardonnay, preferably from France. Champagne is also an excellent option, if you like it. Pairing wine with cranberry is near impossible.
In our family, we saw the release of Beaujolais Nouveau around a week before Thanksgiving as a sign to pair it with turkey, so we did. We collected as many different bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau that we could find and held a taste test. Then we opened some good Beaujolais, the real stuff from France, and drank that with Tom.
By the way, the short answer to the question at the beginning of this post is they did not have wine. Real (“vinifera”) wine grapes are not native to North America, and only masochists drink wine made from native “foxy” grapes, such as Scuppernong, Muscadine and Concord. The Pilgrims drank beer, which was safer to drink than the water, since boiling the water for beer kills any bacteria. So what is the lesson for us? Drink whatever you like! Happy Thanksgiving!
Cheers!
-Submitted by Guy Gimson
(Image credits: Pixabay.com and Vinepair.com)