This is the Thanksgiving issue, and it starts with the other one, the dinner with friends that so many of us now hold the weekend before or after. It ends with a winemaker from Catalonia who looks after a family’s Zinfandel that was first bottled in 1949. In between is what to pour with each dish, a quiz, and the first Second Glass question for Pour Story Society readers.

Wine

Illustration generated with AI.

The Bottle We Always Bring

Friendsgiving, where the word came from, and the Dry Creek Valley wine that has been on the table every year since 2019

In the fall of 2019 I was living in Foster City, a town on the bay side of San Mateo County that didn’t exist until the 1960s, when a developer named T. Jack Foster and his sons pumped millions of cubic yards of sand into the tidal marsh of Brewer Island and built a city on top of it, with lagoons where the sloughs used to be. It is a pleasant place to live and a hard place to feel rooted, and most of the people I knew there had come from somewhere else and planned on leaving for somewhere else again. That fall was also my first one single after thirty years of marriage, and the divorce was still new enough that the holidays ahead looked long. Most of the friends I had were a two-hour drive north, in Sonoma County and Windsor, people I had known for a year or less, and I spent every weekend I could on 101 going to see them.

So when they invited me to something they called Friendsgiving, the Saturday before the real one, I said yes before they finished the sentence. The instructions were the kind that come with these things: bring a dish if I felt like it, bring a bottle, and don’t worry about it. I worried about it anyway. I settled on a bottle from Amista, a small winery on Dry Creek Road that my Sonoma friends had sent me to, partly because I liked the wine and partly because of what the name means, which is loosely the Spanish for making friends. It seemed like the right thing to carry through the door of a house full of people I barely knew.

The kitchen windows were fogged by the time I got there, and the turkey was running late, the way turkeys have run late at every Thanksgiving in the history of the country, so the bottle got opened early and passed around while people stood at the counter with their coats still on. A couple of us were newly divorced, some of the guests were gay, some had only just moved to Sonoma County, and others lived too far from home to get there for a long weekend. The one thing everybody in that kitchen had in common was the wine, and it gave a room full of near strangers something to talk about. Somewhere between the first glass and the carving, somebody asked who had come up with the word Friendsgiving in the first place. Nobody knew. Everyone had a theory, and most of the theories involved a television show.

Travel  ·  The region

Where it is

Dry Creek Valley runs northwest from Healdsburg in northern Sonoma County, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco.

AVA boundary: UC Davis AVA Project. Elevation: USGS. Streams, lakes and roads: County of Sonoma. Tap the map to see it full size.

If you go

Amista is at 3320 Dry Creek Road, and the sparkling flight is the one to book. Stop at the Dry Creek General Store up the road for a sandwich, then drive north to Pedroncelli in Geyserville, where Montse Reece, this issue's winemaker, makes the Zinfandel.

Healdsburg is ten minutes from Amista and has the most places to stay and eat. The valley is quieter in late fall, with the vines going gold and red after harvest, and most tasting rooms ask for a reservation.

Wine  ·  This issue's bottle

Photo illustration by Patrick R. Dunn.

Amista Sparkling Syrah, Morningsong Vineyards

Syrah, traditional method, Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County

It pours a light garnet, somewhere between a rosé and a red, with a fine, steady stream of bubbles. The fruit is cherry, black currant and cranberry, with a little toasted bread from its time aging on the yeast in the bottle, and it's dry, with enough tang to wake up a plate that has turkey, gravy, and stuffing all on it at once.

Those are the flavors I tend to find in it. Somebody else at the table may taste something different, and that’s fine, because their palate is the one doing the tasting. What doesn’t change is what it does at Thanksgiving. From the cranberry sauce to the stuffing to the dressings and every side dish on the plate, it brings the flavors out and makes them bigger, and the first time I tried it with the whole meal, all I could say was wow.

Flavor profile The tags are smells and flavors people often find in this wine. Nothing is added; they come from the grapes and the winemaking. One bar is the least, five the most. Sweetness Dry, though the red fruit can read as sweet Body Light, with a soft texture from the bubbles Acidity Bright and mouthwatering Oak None to speak of; the base wine is made in steel Alcohol 12.5%, light and easy Serve well chilled, at 45 to 50°F. The first time I tasted this wine I was sitting in one of the chairs out back at Amista, the ones that face away from the building and out over the fields, with a bowl of their seasoned popcorn going around and two people I had met maybe twenty minutes earlier. Those two were Ron and Leslie. We went to dinner together that night, and they have been at a lot of our tables since, so every time I open a bottle of the Sparkling Syrah it is the two of them I think of. There will still be a Pinot Noir on my Thanksgiving table, because there always is, but the bubbles and the bright red fruit in this one wake up the turkey, the gravy, and the cranberries in a way the Pinot never quite manages.

It's sold on the Amista Vineyards website and at the winery's tasting room on Dry Creek Road.

Food  ·  At the table

A Bottle for Every Dish

The hardest meal of the year to pair, one plate at a time

Thanksgiving puts sweet, tart, salty, and rich on the same plate and asks one wine to handle all of it. The wines that come closest have good acidity, not much oak, and some red fruit, and the Amista Sparkling Syrah has all three, plus bubbles that cut through the butter and gravy. Here is how it works dish by dish, along with an easy-to-find bottle for each one in case the Amista runs out before the pie does.

Every backup wine below is easy to find at most grocery stores and wine shops.

Travel  ·  Thanksgiving out

Bringing the Bottle to Dinner

What to know before carrying a favorite wine into a restaurant or hotel dining room

This year my Friendsgiving moves out of the kitchen and into a restaurant in Reno, and the Amista is coming along. Plenty of families eat Thanksgiving out now, and a bottle from home can come to the table too, as long as it arrives the right way.

Call ahead and ask whether the restaurant allows outside wine and what it charges to open it, a fee called corkage that varies a lot from place to place. Bring something that isn’t already on their list, since pouring a bottle they sell is a little like a guest showing up with a turkey. A sparkling wine should arrive cold, and most dining rooms will keep it in an ice bucket until the food comes if someone asks when the reservation is made. Offering the server a taste is a small courtesy that usually comes back as good service, and servers notice a tip that takes the wine into account along with the food.

How the night goes at the Atlantis is a story for the next issue.

The Second Glass  ·  November

The Second Glass is a new feature that runs here and in my weekly Vianarra newsletter. It takes its spirit from Karen MacNeil, who started Come Over October in 2024 with Kimberly Charles and Gino Colangelo to get people inviting friends over to share a bottle. Each month has one question, and November’s belongs at the Thanksgiving table.

Who’s missing from your table this year?

Most Thanksgiving tables have a chair somebody used to sit in. It might belong to a parent or grandparent who is gone now, a friend who moved across the country, or someone spending the holiday in a hospital bed or a care home. Pouring a second glass for that person is a small thing to do, and it usually gets the table telling the stories it only tells once a year.

Wine school

Thanksgiving Wine Quiz

🛢️  Making wine

1. In the traditional method, the way Champagne and Amista's sparkling wines are made, where does the second fermentation that creates the bubbles happen?

A. In a pressurized steel tank
B. In the bottle the wine is sold in
C. In an oak barrel

🍇  Grapes and places

2. Beaujolais Nouveau arrives every November, a week before Thanksgiving this year. What grape is it made from?

A. Pinot Noir
B. Gamay
C. Grenache

🍷  In the glass

3. True or false: a bottle of sparkling wine holds about three times the pressure of a car tire.

🍽️  At the table

4. True or false: tart cranberry sauce can make a soft, low-acid wine taste flat.

🎩  Wine people

5. In the 1840s, Nicholas Longworth made the first American sparkling wine to win wide fame, from the Catawba grape. Where was it made?

A. Napa, California
B. Cincinnati, Ohio
C. Hammondsport, New York

Answers at the bottom.

Meet the Winemakers

Her family made the barrels Montse Reece grew up in Tarragona, near the Priorat, and her father’s side of the family were barrel makers. She studied winemaking in Catalonia, made cava in the Penedès, then came to California with little English and started over in the cellar lab. She joined Pedroncelli in 2007, worked beside John Pedroncelli for seven vintages, and became only the third winemaker in the winery’s history after he died in 2015. Asked which one wine she would pour for a stranger, she chose the Bushnell Vineyard Zinfandel, from an eastern-bench vineyard the Pedroncelli family has been tied to since 1943. It has so much spice and natural tannin, she says, that it doesn’t need any Petite Sirah to build it up. Read the interview

Wine school  ·  Answers

1. B, in the bottle. A little yeast and sugar go into a finished still wine, the bottle is capped, and the carbon dioxide from the new fermentation has nowhere to go but into the wine. Tank-made sparkling wine, like most Prosecco, does the same thing in a big pressurized tank.

2. B, Gamay. Beaujolais Nouveau is released on the third Thursday of November, which falls on November 19 this year, one week before Thanksgiving.

3. True. A bottle of Champagne-method sparkling wine holds about 90 pounds per square inch, roughly three times what's in a car tire, which is why the glass is so thick and the cork is caged in wire.

4. True. Tart food makes wine taste less acidic, so a soft wine can turn dull next to the cranberries. Wines with more acid of their own, like sparkling wine, Pinot Noir, and Beaujolais, hold up.

5. B, Cincinnati, Ohio. Longworth's Sparkling Catawba came from vineyards along the Ohio River, and in 1854 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born in Portland, Maine, wrote a poem in its praise called "Catawba Wine."

Have a question about what to pour on Thanksgiving? Hit reply and ask. I read every one.

See you in two weeks.

Patrick R. Dunn

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