Lodi knows alternative Thanksgivings

Winery cat (Jessie's Grove's Royal Tee Vineyard)

“Happy families,” wrote Tolstoy, “are all alike, and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  Or are they?  As it’s also often said, we don’t get to choose our families, but to a large extent, we can certainly control the circumstances under which we see them.  Especially for Thanksgiving, which is all about everyone returning to the nest.

One thing we also know about families:  not all of them have the same taste.  Not everyone, for instance, digs turkey.  In a prior blogpost, A Lodi wine country Thanksgiving, we furnished a treatise on the ideal wines for many of the variations of turkey we love.  But what if your idea of Thanksgiving is, as illustrated by yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle piece called Crab makes you forget turkey on Thanksgiving, is some kind of fruits de mers (fish or shellfish), or roast beef, leg of lamb, baked ham, wild boar or shotgunned game birds?

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A Lodi wine country Thanksgiving

Let your turkey guide your wine choices, and one Lodi family’s Thanksgiving menu and secret family recipe for potato rolls…

The turkey is one of our greatest comfort foods.  When we were kids we simply traced our fingers to draw them.  It has also remained as all-American a culinary delicacy as any:  as ubiquitous as it may seem to us, it’s never caught on in other countries, even in Europe (because they used to confuse native Americans with Indians from India, the French still call it coq d’Inde, the “cock of India” – how twisted is that?).

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Fields Family post-holiday throw-down

Partners in wine: Ryan Sherman and Russ Fields

Russ and Melinda Fields (and their three kids) and their partner/winemakers at Lodi’s Fields Family Wines, Ryan and Jalynn Sherman (with their two kids), celebrate Thanksgiving in the usual tradition.  But the during the weekend after, according to Ryan, the families and their friends get together to commence their “post-holiday throw-down.”

The Fields and Sherman families share a passion for cooking, which goes hand in hand with the passion for grapegrowing and winemaking they have shared since their first meeting of like minds in 2004.

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Thanksgiving sweets everybody loves

Who doesn’t love a great sweet wine?  Your Aunt Gladys and Uncle Boyd, your brother the wine geek, your sister the foodie, mom who loves everything and dad who always proclaims “I know what I like” but still can never remember what he had last week:  they all love the wines winemakers probably work the hardest on which, incidentally, always taste great with dessert.

Gotta love it!

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Taste Lodi: Woodbridge Moscato

Vinous sweet matched with Chef Didier’s poached pears…

The goods: A compelling array of orange blossom, rose petal, tropical flowers (jasmine and frangipani) and honeysuckle perfumes tease the nose; and then totally deliver on the palate:  feathery light(10.3% alcohol) and modestly sweet (4.8% residual sugar) sensations, with the airy crispness of lemon cookies and a tingly touch of effervescence (what the Italians would call frizzante).

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Woodbridge, we hardly knew ye…

Discover startlingly innovative wines and Childrens’ Comfort Foods during THE FIRST SIP weekend at Woodbridge…

Have you heard about one of Lodi’s newer “boutique” wineries:  Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi?

We kid you not, since April Fool’s is in April, not November.  If you’re planning to cover the Lodi winefront during THE FIRST SIP weekend this coming November 13-14, it might be a good idea to set aside a few minutes to visit the giant Woodbridge winery (yes, it’s built to process a quarter of what Lodi grows, and over 8 million cases of wine each year) and taste their lineup of boutique style wines (no more than 200 cases of each) made from decidedly cutting-edge grapes like Vermentino, Verdelho, Malvasia and Marsanne.

You may not have heard of he small, innovative side of Woodbridge, but make no mistake:  these wines are go-o-od.

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