Welcome to another edition of Barrel to Bottle with Binny's Beverage Depot. I'm Jeff Carlin. Of course, as always, Kristen Ellis from Binny's here to teach me everything I need to know about wine, spirits, and then some. Kristen, how are you today? I'm well. What's on tap this week? Well, we can't not talk about the holidays. The what? The holidays, yeah. We want to talk about what to expect, how to make the best use of your time, little tips of the trade, what to expect at a retail location for anything, and then talk about what you should be pairing with your different holiday fare. That's kind of what I've cooked up today. Cool. I see what you did there. Boom. But it's not just us. We're not alone here. Who's here with us? Oh, who is here? We've got Monique Huston. Thank you for coming. I love wine. So I love you. And this is free wine for me. My favorite kind of wine. Oh, it's so good. Best kind. Yeah. And we've got Greg. How are you doing, Greg? Great. Welcome. So we want to talk about quickly how crazy it is to shop during this time of year. I mean, Monique, you don't like shopping anyway. I hate shopping regardless. My thought always is I'm not a wine expert like you. And you go in and you go into a huge store, Binny's, and there's thousands of things there. White, red. I mean, that's kind of where my knowledge stops. White, cold, fish? I don't know. So I always like to go in armed with the last great red I had was X, the last great white I had was X. And if you can just remember that and say, I want something along the lines of this, the experts in the aisles at the stores will know exactly where to direct you. Awesome. Good advice. Also, instead of going back to make multiple trips, I like to just think, let's think about Thanksgiving, what we need. Let's think about Christmas or Hanukkah or New Year's, what we need and just get it all at one time. Oftentimes, though, or in addition, when you buy more, you save more, right? That's that buying in bulk. It's the magic of safety in numbers. But you're right, though, because I do the same thing every year. I get the gifts for the kids and the friends and the family, and then it's like, oh crap, I got to go to a party tomorrow for so-and-so, and I got to find a wine and bring a wine. I got to bring something and I don't know what to get. And I'm like, I forgot, and then I'm rushing out, and I'm stuck with whatever the first thing on the shelf is. Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, you make haste, and sometimes you pick things that you may not like or may not know. And if you're a bit more thoughtful and kind of just come a bit organized, I think you'll have a better experience of it all, and you'll have more time. Yeah, and I can BS. I don't have to BS into the party. Like, yeah, I got this bottle of Chateau Notte-de-Poies because it's so great. Can you say that again? No, I'm not going to. The pronunciation was spot on. That was great. Yeah. Take notes from Jeff. Oh, boy. I wouldn't. I can't take notes. As we all know, I always have a glass in my hand. There you go. I also think two people feel like maybe it has to be expensive or whatever. I love it. You could literally go in and say, my budget is $12. What is the best white that pairs with chicken for $12? And someone will just help you beeline it right to that wine. I get more excited when I find a wine that I'm super happy about for $12, $8. I'm like, this is awesome. Drinking this all day. Give me a case. I get really jazzed about it. I think it's fantastic. Also, retail staff, just quickly, a lot of them are overworked. A lot of people are really, really busy. So everyone just try to be nice to each other. I think everything will go a lot smoother. So long story longer, come prepared, buy everything at once, get over that psychological jump of just, you're going to spend $400 anyway, so you might as well just do it at one time, and just have a smile on your face. Great. Obligatory plug, if you buy 12 bottles of wine, 750 milliliter mix and match, you'll get a 10 percent discount with your Binny's card. I like that. Incentive for Binny's card. You know what else is cool about Binny's cards? I get this a lot because people are like, well, six months ago, I got this wine, this wine guy recommended to me, and I can't remember what it is. I'm like, dude, we got it on your record. We know when you use it. So and then I look it up and they get it again, and it's just we're jumping and holding hands to the aisle. And it's so I like that too. I think it's good. I think it's a good thing. Yeah, somebody comes in and says, I had this wine. You sold it to me. But you have a lot of favorites. Can we then you can look in the system and you can look at it, get it again, build from that. It's pretty sweet little system. So we're talking about different styles of wine that we can use for different flavors that are represented on the table. There's a lot of different flavors. You know, when I eat my big old fat plate of food on Thanksgiving, I have a lot of things on my fork at one time. So it's the sweet potatoes, it's the savory, it's the vegetables, it's the salad, it's all of it all together. What's cool about Thanksgiving, apart from giving thanks, is that you can have so many different kinds of wine on the table to kind of go with these different flavors that are represented. I don't know if you guys do that, but I've got my favorites. First, it's Fizz. I call it lovingly Fizz. I like Bubbles. I think it is the premiere and the best pairing for Thanksgiving Day. A, it's relatively low in alcohol. So you can drink it pretty much all day long. If you're sipping, you know the rules. You can kind of get away with that and it's delicious. It's cold, it's refreshing, it's got a lot of CO2, so it's going to really refresh your palate and kind of keep you going all day. So I like Fizz as my number one pick for Thanksgiving pairings. What kind of Fizz do you like, Monique? Oh boy. I like... It's personal. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, champagne is always really great, but I think sometimes can get expensive. So I mean, just like a good Blanc de Blanc, something like that. But I'm with you. You're trying so many different foods, textures of foods and oily things and cheese and skipping from this to this to this. It's a great in-between palate cleanser. Absolutely. Yeah. It does not have to be expensive. You're right. Champagne can be 30, 40, 50, $80. You can get a nice Cava, 10, 15, something like that that's really dry and would still cut through everything. Kristen, what's the sparkling from Loire, the Chenin Blanc? Well, there are two that are 100 percent Chenin Blanc, and the most prevalent is Vouvray, and the other is Sommelur. That plush fruit quality, total crowd pleaser. Absolutely. A little bit of kind of a smoky sort of complexity to it, but also really high acidity, light body, it has everything you need. But if you don't want fizz, you could do something like Mousqueté, which is super overlooked, it's kind of forgotten about, but it's always in my back pocket for a bottle of wine to pick out during this time of year. Same reason, low ABV, but also light, fresh, fruity, simple, and really versatile, just pairs with everything on the table. Pinot Gris would be another example of kind of a low ABV wine that's white and cool and you can drink all day. Next on the docket is Rosé. I love Rosé. People want to call it brosé, but I don't think that that's okay. I think that's wrong. The most common rosé is obviously from the south of France, made from Grenache. They're super, super light pink, high in acid, red fruit flavors. They're fantastic, easy to drink all day. But let's start with the dishes. And let's start with the heavy hitters first. Stuffing. Nice. Monique? I'm stuffing all the way. In my family, there's typically three or four different kinds of stuffing. Just a full on plate of stuffing. So there's like vegetarian stuffing, Sasha's stuffing. So one with raisins, one without raisins. You got to go that route. One with oysters. Yeah. That's a thing, oyster stuffing. Yeah. One from inside the bird, one from on the side. I love stuffing. I love stuffing. So what do you like to drink with your stuffing? Then I'm kind of with, I would like a nice rosé. I wouldn't mind though, maybe a gamay, Beaujolais, something like that. Bread, because it, formidable flavors, because now you're into meats and oils and bread, but then also, but light-bodied. Right. It kind of says Beaujolais to me. Well, pick up that glass of red right there. This is a Coteron, which is kind of a classic red wine for these heavier dishes. The main grape in Coteron is Grenache. So kind of a beach bunny, very fruity, likes that dry hot climate, but is very classic for low and tannin. You said Gimé. So when you're saying Gimé, what do you think? What kind of wine comes to? Beaujolais. Beaujolais. Yeah, exactly. So the Nouveau, which will come out, I think Thursday before Thanksgiving, but you can't sell it before that day, or at least midnight. And so you can get that fantastic wine made in a very special production method that makes sure it's very, very fruity, very, very light and probably better with a bit of a chill on the bottle if you're going to serve that. I also like Barbera. It comes from Piedmont. It has kind of the same descriptors as we get from Cote de Rhone from Gemay. So it's another favorite of mine as far as reds go. All in all, Cote de Rhone, and I have a friend who always says, I bring Cote de Rhone and put it on the table, and then she'll put the Chateauneuf de Pop under the table at her feet just for her. Chateauneuf de Pop is kind of a wine along the same vein, but it generally commands a much higher price and is generally higher qualities. She's greedy. The opposite of Thanksgiving. No giving there. Exactly. Moving on, we have another glass. We're kind of going backwards. A lot of people say when they taste wine, they want to go white to red, but I actually sometimes like to go the opposite direction. So you have a white wine here. This is a Sauvignon Blanc. It's Suge from California, and I love it. Sauvignon Blanc is the almighty white wine to be paired with Thanksgiving. I mean, it's just kind of the classic pairing. Everybody writes about it, everybody talks about it, and there's a reason that it is so popular and so good. We talk about stuffing and potatoes and things, but there are quite a bit of vegetable dishes, an array of them, that are gathered on the table as well. For us at home, it's always that classic green bean casserole, right? I love it. It's so, so good. But salad, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts is another one, oftentimes with bacon, a little bit of fat in there. Sauvignon Blanc, it's clean, it's crisp, it's linear. It's got lovely citrus and kind of unripe stone fruit a bit, but then really herbaceous and just lovely. So that's going to really pair well with the vegetables that are represented. I mean, I hope I have enough glassware for all the wine that I'm going to have on my table. I need like six glasses per person. How do you feel about the Sauvignon Blanc? It's textbook. Textbook. Oh, it's right on. Yeah. Grassy, melon, peach, like a little herbal savory component. Yeah. It's a lovely, lovely wine. Sauvignon Blanc would work. I think some people get freaked out by Sauvignon Blanc because you have the ones that kind of go towards that like green pepper or grapefruit, you know, that are really kind of- In your face. Really in your face where this, I feel like it's textbook, it's well integrated, and it really actually makes- there's a salinity to it that I think is really lovely that makes me want that next bite of mashed potatoes. Exactly. For sure. So yeah, this is a domestic Sauvignon Blanc. Like I said, you go for Sancerre. Those two styles are from those two places in France that would kind of give you a bit more of that reserved Sauvignon Blanc, and so it won't really jump out and overpower. You nail it on the head, though. This with Brussels sprouts, like roast Brussels sprouts, and a little bit of bacon in there, I mean, this ties all that together and puts a big Sauvignon Blanc bow on it. I like it. We're not tasting it, but what would you do with dessert? Because that's the next place where you come to that myriad of everything from savory to sweet. So for me, there's sweet food that's a part of the dinner, right? So it's like sweet potatoes, squash, carrots as well, right? Glazed, sometimes with maple. So all these sweet dishes, you want to make sure that a wine with a little bit of sweetness, so Gewurztraminer or Riesling would be fantastic. High acid, light and body, all those things we talked about before, really hitting on the head. As Monique asked, what do we pair with sweet food? The rule is this, the wine must always be as sweet or sweeter than the dish. If you have a sweet dish and a dry wine, you're going to render that wine even drier, more bitter, more stringent, acidic, you're going to bring out any tannins if it's a red. What it does is sort of exaggerates everything that we don't like. If it's too out of whack or too high of a quantity in a wine, as far as those structural elements are concerned. With sugar, we want to make sure that we have a sweet wine with our sweet dish. I like sautern. I think sautern from Bordeaux with pumpkin pie is just killer. It's my favorite. I want to make sure then if you're watching tannin, maybe that ruby port might not be so good. So you might want to go for something with a bit of age on it, a little bit of thyme and wood and a tawny port, I think would go good because the tannins are quite diminished. You serve that with a bit of a chill so that would really pair well. So sweet food, sweet wine. All right, Kristen, so we're wrapping another episode here and it was all Thanksgiving. It's been a good episode. I mean, I'm hungry. I'm ready for Thanksgiving. Me too. So every week, folks, you guys can go ahead right into us at Binny's Bev on Twitter for your chance to win a $20 gift card. If we choose, you're a fantastic question. And the winner this week is Ben Taylor, 05. He said, I went to my first tasting last week at the champagne location. I want to know how the products are selected for these tastings because they're really, really good. And Ben, that's a great question. It actually kind of happens a couple of different ways. But the primary way it happens is the lovely staff at Binny's Beverage Depot. They get to kind of curate every single tasting that they want to do. So all the products are generally wines or spirits or beers that we're excited about or that we feel go well with the season or whatever holiday is coming up. If you want to have that same experience that Ben Taylor had down in champagne, go to www.binnys.com/events. You'll find every single tasting, every class, every seminar all there at the Binny's Beverage Depot location nearest you. For another edition of Barrel to Bottle with the Binny's Beverage Depot, I am, of course, Jeff Carlin, Kristen Ellis. Take us home. What do we have to thank today? I want to thank Greg Versh. I want to thank Monique Huston. You guys are lovely. Thank you for joining us today. And I want to thank everyone for listening in. Jeff, as always, keep tasting.