Italian Wine for the Holiday Table: Thanksgiving and the Winter Feast

The thing nobody tells you about the American holiday table is how much is happening on it at the same time. I learned this not in Lyon and not in Torino but in a farmhouse kitchen outside Hudson, New York, one late November, where a friend of Sylvie's had assembled twenty people and what looked like the entire autumn harvest onto a table that had clearly been built for fewer of both. There was the turkey, of course, pale and enormous and faintly anxious-looking. But around it: a dish of sweet potatoes under a crust of sugar, a bowl of cranberry so bright it seemed lit from within, chestnut stuffing heavy with sage, green beans, a gratin, a cheese or two waiting in the wings, and somewhere down the far end a pie already cooling. The light outside was going copper the way it does at four in the afternoon in late autumn, and someone handed me a glass and asked, with the particular hope of a host, what on earth you were supposed to drink with all of it.

That question has a better answer than most people give it, and the answer is Italian. Not because Italy owns Thanksgiving, which it plainly does not, but because the problem the holiday table sets is exactly the problem Italian wine was built to solve. A feast like this is not one flavor but a dozen at once, sweet beside savory, fat beside acid, the mild breast meat of the bird beside the dark gaminess of the leg, and it asks a wine to be sociable across all of it rather than perfect for any one thing. The obvious big reds fail here, the plush high-alcohol bottles with sweet fruit and soft acidity, because they meet a sweet, rich plate with more of the same and the whole thing turns to syrup. What the table wants instead is structure with savor, acidity that cuts and tannin that is fine rather than aggressive: the great reds of Piemonte and the Veneto, and a bright white to open the door.

The Longest Table of the Year

Begin with what the plate actually does to a wine, because the holiday plate does several contradictory things at once. The sweetness of the candied yams and the cranberry is the first trap: sugar makes a dry wine taste thinner and more sour than it is, which is how a soft, fruit-forward red curdles into something flat and confected beside a spoonful of cranberry. The fat of the stuffing and the gravy and the skin is the second force, and this one works for you, because fat is what fine tannin wants to meet. The third is the sheer neutrality of the turkey itself, a mild, lean canvas that leaves the sides to do the talking. Put those three together and you see why the wine cannot be chosen for the bird. It has to be chosen for the whole crowded, sweet-and-savory, hours-long sprawl of the table.

This is where acidity becomes the hero of the meal. A wine with a high, bright acid line does on the palate what a squeeze of lemon does on a plate: it lifts, it resets, it keeps the richness from piling into heaviness over the long second and third helpings the holiday encourages. The great Italian reds are, almost to a bottle, higher in acid than their New World counterparts, and that single trait is what lets them sit down at a table this chaotic and behave. The holiday table also rewards the fine, silken tannin of Nebbiolo over the broad grip of a young Cabernet, because fine tannin threads through a mixed plate where a coarse one snags. The Italian argument for the feast is really an argument about proportion: brightness over weight, savor over sweetness, a wine that joins the conversation rather than ending it.

Something Bright to Begin

Every long feast needs a first hour, and the first hour does not want a serious red. People are arriving, coats are coming off, there is prosecco for some and sparkling water for others, and on the counter the antipasti are doing their quiet work: a board of salumi and a wedge of something hard and salty, olives, perhaps a plate of fried sage leaves if the cook is ambitious. This is the moment for a bright, high-acid Italian white, and its job is not to impress but to refresh, to wake the palate up and carry it from the doorway to the table without fatigue. A crisp white from the Marche built on Pecorino, with its saline cut and its bitter-almond snap, is exactly the kind of thing: savory rather than fruity, mineral rather than floral, a wine that sharpens the appetite instead of filling it.

The instinct to open with a big, oaked white fails for the same reason the plush red fails later: a rich, buttery white tires the palate before the meal has begun, where a lean, nervy one keeps it hungry. Think of the opener as the wine equivalent of the first course in a Piedmontese dinner, the vitello tonnato whose whole purpose is to make you want what comes next. Keep it cold, keep it bright, and save the evening's best attention for the reds, which are what the rest of this is about.

The Wine That Does the Most Work

If you pour only one wine through the heart of the meal, pour Alto Piemonte Nebbiolo, because no red in Italy is better suited to the holiday table's demand that a single bottle flatter a dozen dishes. These are the wines of the hills north of the Langhe, grown on glacial moraine and alpine terraces rather than the rich clay of Barolo, and the ground gives them a lighter body, a more transparent color, and an acidity so bright and a tannin so fine that they seem almost designed for a table where nothing stays still. A Cantalupo Ghemme 2016, from a family that has farmed the moraine above Novara since the fifteen hundreds, carries exactly the saline, red-fruited, cedar-and-dried-rose profile that threads through turkey and stuffing and even the awkward sweetness of the cranberry without ever turning flat. It is savory to its core, and savor is what the holiday plate is starving for.

Reach a little higher into the Alps and you find Carema, Nebbiolo grown on terraces so steep the vines are trained on stone pillars, a wine of almost weightless intensity, all alpine herbs and red cherry and a cool, mineral lift. A Produttori di Carema Classico 2019 is the bottle for the guest who claims not to like red wine, so fresh and so fine it does beautifully with the lighter end of the table: the white meat, the roasted vegetables, the gratin. The full tannin-and-acid reasoning for why this family of wines works at the table lives in our guide to Nebbiolo food pairing, the hub for everything that follows. If I could send one case to that farmhouse in Hudson, it would be split between Ghemme and Carema, and I would not worry about a single dish on the table.

When the Langhe Comes to Dinner

There comes a point in the meal, usually the moment the dark leg meat and the mushroom-heavy stuffing and the gravy all land on the same fork, when the table can take a more serious wine, and this is where Barolo earns its place. It is the same grape as the Alto Piemonte wines, Nebbiolo in its grandest and most structured expression, grown on the calcareous clay of the Langhe that gives it more weight, more tannin, and a deeper register of tar, dried rose, truffle, and tobacco. Poured against the delicate parts of the meal a young Barolo would overwhelm them, but poured against the savory heart of the feast it does what it was built to do: its tannin finds the fat of the gravy and the skin, its acidity cuts the richness, and its aromatics meet the earthiness of the mushrooms and the roast as if the two had been introduced long ago, which, in the hills they come from, they were.

The bottle I trust here is the Brezza Barolo 2018, the village wine from Giacomo Brezza e Figli, a family that has farmed in the village of Barolo since 1885, works certified organic, and ages in large Slavonian oak botti that lend structure without a flavor of their own. It is a true Barolo without the decade of patience a single-vineyard cru demands, which makes it a wine for a table rather than a cellar; give it a two-hour decant and serve it cellar-cool, nearer sixteen degrees than room temperature, and it will carry the center of the meal with room to spare. Our Barolo food pairing guide gives the full account of why this grape behaves as it does with food; and for the lighter, more aromatic sibling from across the Tanaro, the one I reach for when the table skews gentler, there is Barbaresco food pairing, the bottle that opens territory Barolo is too broad-shouldered to reach.

The Richest Course

The winter feast days do not end at Thanksgiving. They run on through the dark of December, and the plates grow heavier as the light grows shorter: the standing rib, the braise that has been in the oven since morning, the board of aged cheese that appears when the table has stopped pretending it is still eating dinner. This is the hour for Amarone, the great dried-grape red of the Valpolicella, made by laying Corvina and its siblings on racks to shrivel for months before they are ever pressed, a process called appassimento that concentrates everything the grape has into a wine of fifteen or sixteen degrees of alcohol and a dark, bruised-cherry, fig-and-cocoa intensity. It is not a subtle wine, and it should not be asked to be. Its whole art at the table is meeting weight with weight.

Put an Amarone beside the lightest dish on the table and the dish vanishes; put it beside the heaviest and something remarkable happens, the wine's warmth and the plate's richness holding each other up. A Paolo Cottini Amarone 2018, from a boutique, woman-led estate in Castelrotto in the heart of the Valpolicella Classica whose parcels climb from a hundred and eighty metres to nearly six hundred, is a wine of real place rather than mere power: dense garnet going to brick, dried black cherry and sweet tobacco and a lift of bitter almond, with that saving thread of amaro on the finish that keeps the concentration from tipping into sweetness. The 2018 is the tauter of the house's recent pair and rewards a decant, which makes it the wine to open with intent for the braise or the hard, crystalline cheese at the end of a long evening. It is, in every sense, the last word; the reasoning behind it is set out in our guide to Paolo Cottini and to Amarone food pairing.

I think often about that table outside Hudson, about the host's hopeful question and the copper light coming through the window, and about how the answer turned out to be simpler and more generous than the question assumed. You do not need a different wine for every dish. You need a few bottles chosen for brightness over weight and savor over sweetness, a bright white to open, the fine, versatile Nebbiolo of the Alto Piemonte through the heart of the meal, a Barolo for the serious savory courses, and an Amarone for the richest thing at the end. Every one of those wines is Italian, every one of them is here, and every one of them was shaped by a table at least as crowded and at least as long as the American one. When the light goes copper again this November, that is what I will pour, and I will not spend a moment of the evening worrying about what goes with the cranberry.