Dear Feastlings,
I’m not here to harp on the choices of the incoming administration- the people have spoken, and much like the past several elections, about half the people in the country are walking away from it wiping the sweat from their collective brow while the other half walk away despondently รก la Charlie Brown. Or kicking in the windows of the Capital, but that’s admittedly a small number relative to the rest of the voting public and I’m hoping it was a one-off.
I will, however, point this out, as a wine lover: wine? It’s going to get more expensive. If the wine you enjoy is imported and tariffed up the wazoo, no matter what they tell you, and no matter their reasoning, the cost of a tariff is passed on to the importer, and that importer covers the cost by charging the distributor. The distributor, in turn, boosts the price that the retailer pays, and the retailer then hikes the price for the end consumer. The buck, as it were, stops here. In your lap. So: caveat emptor. The longer you wait, the pricier it’ll get.
My own strategy is to try stocking up on the foreign stuff and riding it out to the best of my ability, whether here in the restaurant and the shop or whether at home, and so, in the spirit of what limited foresight I have, this week’s tasting in a series of Thanksgiving table wine tastings features all wines from elsewhere, though fortunately all wines that are already stateside and have thus avoided the additional expense of any new tariffs. And what’s more, they’re all Thanksgiving-friendly wines.
For those of you doing the gratitude thing, be it for the current state of affairs or for what you can blow the dust off of and shine up with your shirtsleeve, we’ve still got a Thanksgiving carryout menu available for you to order from, and we’ll have the Thanksgiving delicacies you order waiting for you on Wednesday the 27th with heating instructions so you can heat it up without spending the entire day in the kitchen and feeling less thankful as the day progresses. The deadline for ordering is a week from Saturday, so call us by November 23rd at the latest.
And for those of you thankful to have a meal that isn’t turkey and stuffing and cranberry and gravy, we’ll be serving one of those up as well, with our pals from Deep Sky Vineyard, on Sunday, November 17th.
Curried chicken thighs and fig-leaf-wrapped flatiron steak sounds like something I’d be grateful for, especially paired with these tasty wines made by James Callahan of Rune fame.
Beyond that, I don’t know what to say. While I’ve got gratitude in spades for the people who work here and the people who support us, I’ve long been a glass half empty kind of guy, so gratitude for much else is- well, let’s call it challenging for me just now. That said, I’m trying to create a few new neural pathways, so I’ll be focusing on you folks for now: Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Your occasionally grateful friend,
Doug