It's tough to think about autumn drinking when summer has boomeranged back with such a vengeance. We complain, but maybe it's not such a bad thing — the few bottles of rosé left rolling around in the fridge won't have to wait until next year. But when the chill we glimpsed last week decides to get serious, and your coffee taste goes from iced to Pumpkin Spiced, you don't want to be caught with a fridge full of pink wine and a cellar unprepared for the best season.
In the hottest months, our physical thirsts need servicing, so we enlist mouthwatering rieslings and gulpable rosés to help us through the sweaty summer. But as the weather cools, our needs change, and red wines rise to meet them.
This does not mean that you have to dive into tooth-staining reds the moment you put away your cotton suit. Beaujolais, the light and fruity wine of Burgundy, seems to have achieved consensus Thanksgiving Wine status, and for good reason: it "goes with" the smattering of traditional Turkey Day dishes as well as any one wine could be expected. Beaujolais is much more than the frivolous Nouveau version promoted in garish posters every winter. Trust your wine seller to introduce you to more serious wines from one of the crus (pronounced "crews"; singular cru): 10 communes whose wines have adamantly proven their quality. The best of Beaujolais sometimes exceed $30, but excellent wines are often much less.
For this transitional time of early fall, I like Valpolicella ripasso — a Northern Italian wine that is light by nature, but lent some gravitas by having been fermented with the dried skins of grapes used to make the Veneto region's brooding amarone. At its worst, ripasso is just a ploy to bolster subpar wine with amarone's leavings. But at its best, it is a fragrant and lively wine with a satisfying structure, and the 2009 Ca' del Monte Valpolicella Ripasso is a gem of the latter category.
In the restaurant business, "hand-sells" are wines that will only gather dust unless the server or sommelier convinces open-minded guests to try them. Rojac Istra's Refošk is a hand-sell if I've ever seen one — intimidated diners back away from the Slovenian wine based solely on the háek (diacritic mark) over the "s." It's too bad, because this wine walks the intensity wire without falling off to the overbearing side. It is purple and opaque in the glass, and could be mistaken for one of those "black wines" of Australia whose color too often signals a lumbering wine. But the Refošk is balanced — sleek enough for a bedtime wine, robust enough to hang with whatever is strapped to your hood.
What do we want from a fall wine? There may be a chill in the air, but no oppressive weather to counteract. So if a summer wine is supposed to quench, what is a fall wine supposed to do, exactly? I want from a fall wine the same thing I want from the other palliatives of autumn; what I want when I grab a scarf on the way out the door, and what I want when I look around for an espresso after stepping off the bus into a cold wind — the feeling that as long as I have this, right now, everything will be all right.
There aren't too many red wines I can think of that don't boast this essential virtue. Red wines go with nearly everything we associate with fall. On the night before Thanksgiving a few years back, when most holiday travelers had unwound from their long drives home and were out getting drunk at that bar where you see everyone from your high school, I served a young couple and their parents. It was obvious that they had not seen one another in a long time, and they laughed and told stories over ribeyes and red wine as I stood by, one of the many martyrs of the service industry who gives up his holiday to accommodate others'.
But this moment was worth it. It was sad that I was not with my own family, but the residual joy I gleaned from theirs made the whole night not just tolerable, but warming. I doubt they remember what wine they drank that night, but I do. It was a jammy but bright 2009 Groom shiraz — a wine I heartily recommend. But I even more heartily recommend this kind of meal, which can make whatever red wine you're drinking seem magical. This family was, in the best possible meaning of the term, catching up.
The weather and seasons can make you thirst for a certain beverage, but it's a formidable wine that can make you wish for another time altogether. The first sip of a Domaine du Grand Tinel Châteauneuf-du-Pâpe my wife and I drank at the end of August had me pining for fall's most frigid days. It's a raisiny, higher-alcohol powerhouse made of 100 percent grenache — a rarity in a land of relentless blending. My budget has me sticking to modestly priced wines from the Côtes-du-Rhône region most of the time, and they are just fine. But this full-bodied wine, emanating dried herbs and cooked fruit, reminded me why Châteauneuf rules the region.
My wife went to bed early that night, leaving me alone with two-thirds of a bottle of a wine that was ahead of its time by two months; a wine that made me wish I was a stranger in a friendly tavern far away — a place with a stone fireplace. It made me wish I were eating some kind of stew. It had me constructing the perfect time and place in my mind, so evocative was this bearskin rug of a wine.
I went out the next day, bought four more bottles, and put them in the basement for a later day. Because one of these coming early nights, a friend will stop by unexpectedly. Or we will find ourselves cooped up on a rainy day with nothing much to do and nowhere to go. That's when I will look around, see that we are in the full grip of fall, and realize that it is a perfect time. And that's when I will say, "I'll be right back — I've got the perfect wine."
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