Salt Lake City Bailliage Prepares for Thanksgiving

By Sue Geary, Vice Chargée de Presse, FWS, IWS, SWS

Wine trivia question for the season:

Which wine is released for shipment every year at 12:01 am of the third Thursday of November?

Answer:

Beaujolais Nouveau

There could not be a more perfect wine to feature for our November gathering than this young wine which is a perfect match for Thanksgiving Dinner. Our Vice Echanson Kasey Dubler could not have done a finer job of taking us on an educational journey through the Beaujolais Region of France.  Kasey’s spotlight on Beaujolais Nouveau was delightfully informative. It was also bittersweet given that one of our many losses of 2020 was Georges Duboeuf, the wine merchant turned winemaker who started a global ritual around the nouveau wine thereby elevating the Beaujolais Region as a whole.  Duboeuf died of a stroke on January 4 at the age of 86, but his nouveau wines with the bright floral labels graced the wine store shelves again this year.

Kasey also took us north to the explore the ten crus of Beaujolais.  These are the more elegant, complex, and age-worthy wines of the region.  Beaujolais is unique in that its wines are almost exclusively made from the Gamay grape.  The differences in the wines’ characteristics are largely attributed to differences in the soils of the northern and southern parts of the region.

For the second part of our pre-Thanksgiving event, Kasey described some wines that pair especially well with the many foods of a traditional Thanksgiving feast.  Chaîne Board members submitted their favorite Thanksgiving wines and Kasey completed the line-up with a few wines that aren’t always associated with this holiday meal.  A new section of our Chaîne Salt Lake City website titled Education includes all of the slides that Kasey prepared for this event.

Once again, it was so nice to see some of our members (from the waist up, at least) thanks to Zoom. We were delighted that Ashby Decker, who served an incredible 23 years as our Bailli, and his wife, Anne Cullimore Decker, were able to join us for this event. We appreciate everyone’s continued support during these most challenging times.