Thanksgiving was originally created as a holiday in America by Abraham Lincoln to be celebrated on the last Thursday in the month of November, FDR attempted to change the date, but the populace created a backlash and the holiday went back to its original day of celebration.  I mention all of this, because the day before Wednesday is the artificial day that my Bride uses to mark the end of Christmas; not that we celebrate it for eleven months, but she shops eleven months.  The day before Christmas all presents are wrapped, and bundled by family, the Christmas and Chanukah cards are filled out, newsletters enclosed and posted, along with all cartons that are to be shipped to celebrants that we will not see for the season.  This worked great during my years in retailing, because if I had free time, it was not spent shopping, and that by the time Christmas Day occurred, all the bills for the holiday were paid off and we could plan on a well-earned vacation in January or February, depending on business; I might add that she was doing this prior to the Raconteur days, but I whole heartedly accepted her planning.  The house is prepped for the crowd of twenty-four this year, so that requires a table in the dining room, the living room, the breakfast nook, and a few little tables in the family room, because invariably there is a little football game that is historically played in Detroit on Thanksgiving Day, after the annual Thanksgiving Parade, traditions are maintained in Detroit.

There is a snide debate that my Bride and I have on Thanksgiving, during the craziness of food preparation.  She calls for appetizers for two and dinner at three; the debate is always about who the first guests would be and a what time, and when should we expect the last to arrive.  She starts the appetizers after the first guests arrive, and splits the appetizers in half, so that there is something new to pull out when the majority show up, usually just before the scheduled dinner, which we always plan on serving later.  The first bottle of wine that is opened is for my Bride and myself and she adores Sauvignon Blanc, and we tend to buy several brands in the handy-dandy economical multi-case packages.  I would venture to say that over the years, her favorite is from Famille Sichel and we have been buying it vintage after vintage.  This year it is Famile Sichel Sirius Bordeaux 2022.  Famille Sichel is a family owned negocient firm from 1883 in Bordeaux, as they were in the procurement process for their locations in Mainz, London, and New York.  In 1938 they even bought Chateau Palmer, which at the time had fallen on bad times and have since brought it back to all its glory.  The family does not believe in resting on their laurels as in 2001 they even built a completely new bottling and storage facility in the Bordeaux region.  This particular bottle of wine is a blend of the two leading white grapes of Bordeaux, namely Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc.  I don’t think that I would be remiss to opine that this wine was aged in Stainless Steel as there was plenty of fruit and very refreshing.  It starts off with a nose of citrus fruits and finishes with some terroir with a decent finish.  The wine is always fresh and needs a little time for the first glasses to breathe as they are very tight and still quite acidic.

Then as we got more of the crowd in for additional appetizers and there was demand for Chardonnay, I opened a bottle of Domaine Albert Bichot Bourgogne Vielles Vignes de Chardonnay 2020.  Domaine Albert Bichot is a major family-owned and run negociant house and estate owner in Burgundy, that began in 1831 and is now based in Beaune.  Their main focus is Pinot Noir and Chardonnay wines and in their more southern holdings they also produce some Gamay in Beaujolais.  Alberic Bichot took over the reins in 1996 and is the sixth generation of family to run the holdings.  They own more than one-hundred hectares of sustainably farmed vineyards divided among six estates, and the majority are run organically.  The fruit is from the Cote de Beaune and the Haute Cote de Beaune and the vines are from twenty-five to thirty-five years of age hence “old vines.”  The majority of this wine has been aged for five to six weeks in mostly oak barrels.  A pale-golden colored wine that offered notes of pears, apples, and butter.  On the palate tones of white fruits, tinges of pineapple, honey, oak, and terroir with a soft finish of fruit.