Thanksgiving Conundrum

Thanksgiving Conundrum (not the wine necessarily but the situation)

co·nun·drum/kəˈnəndrəm/

Noun:

A confusing and difficult problem or question. A question asked for amusement, typically one with a pun in its answer; a riddle.

The Annual Discussion: Wines for Thanksgiving By ERIC ASIMOV

Over at Saignee, one of my favorite wine blogs, the proprietor, Cory Cartwright, is letting off an amusing amount of steam. Basically, he feels he’s surrounded by Thanksgiving idiots, offering the same trite wine suggestions they foist onto the populace each year.

Having just written my own Thanksgiving column, perhaps I’m feeling a bit defensive. Yet even allowing for the reams of conventional wisdom and standard-issue advice recycled each year I believe the annual discussion has its place. Cory, you’re too young to be such a curmudgeon, no matter how facetious!

I might be completely wrong, but my guess is that many people do the same thing year after year at Thanksgiving. They roast a turkey, make stuffing, recreate some sort of traditional family recipe for sweet potatoes, brussel sprouts, or whatever. Does repetition breed ease and relaxation? Of course not. No matter how many times they’ve done it before, many people crave step-by-step advice for the baffling chore of roasting a turkey, baking a pie and, yes, for choosing wines, and they want it year after year.

I’m no different. I’ve been roasting turkeys for more Thanksgivings than I want to count, but each year it feels as if I’m starting from scratch. Many years ago, when I first came to work at The Times — I was 26, even younger than Cory — I had a boss who qualified not only as a curmudgeon but as a full-fledged grouch. He had a dog-eared file in his desk called “How We Did It Last Time’’ in which he stored the wisdom necessary for annual events like election nights and budget resolutions. This guy must have been at The Times for decades, but he still needed to look it up.

Same holds true with food and especially wine. Even with repetitious events like cooking a turkey and choosing wines, writers and editors must not only break it all down but stomp on it until nothing is left to wonder about. Cory made me laugh when he derided the recommendation that people serve both a red and a white.  “Seriously, this counts as professional wine advice.’’ he wrote. Hey, I wrote that myself, just as I do every year!

Why bother with something seemingly so elementary? Like a recipe that begins “Preheat the oven,’’ stating the obvious is intended to be a service, as is the whole ritual of Thanksgiving advice. It’s all here, no need to check reference books, consult last year’s column or call up the crisis line. It’s a zero-sum holiday, probably because the vast majority of people have more important things to think about than which wines to choose for Thanksgiving.

So here at world headquarters of Wines of The Times and The Pour, we’re happy to go through it again each year. Choices abound, and while the general advice remains the same, the discussion of specific wines is always different.

I know many food and wine writers say they dread the annual Thanksgiving chores, just as some consumers, like Cory, profess to dread their annual reappearance. But I’ve come to embrace the repetition. The challenge for writers and editors is not to regurgitate the same tired prose year after year but to rethink their advice, make sure it’s useful and offer it in fresh ways.

By the way, I’m teasing Cory a bit, but Saignee is really an excellent blog. Check out his last post, well worth reading.

via The Annual Discussion: Wines for Thanksgiving – NYTimes.com.