Arielle Johnson is a flavor scientist and the author of the book Flavorama: A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor. Food science writer Harold McGee notes that wine can be the perfect punctuation to a rich Thanksgiving meal. But to get more specific, Ian Krupp, wine director at the award-winning Sherman Oaks restaurant Anajak Thai, steps in. Earlier this year, Krupp won both the 2024 Michelin sommelier award and a Rising Star sommelier award.
Evan Kleiman: One of the things that intrigues me about what you do is you're required to come up with wine that pairs with really big, flavorful food and when I think about Thanksgiving, it's kind of this strange, bifurcated meal. On one hand, you have the turkey, which no matter what you do to it, is somewhat bland. Then there are all these sides that can run the gamut from brown food, rich flavors, a lot of earthiness, to people's personal takes, which might veer more toward an Anajak menu. How do you approach a dinner experience like Thanksgiving?
Ian Krupp: Yes, that's really great that you said that, "bifurcated," because it is and so is our food menu at Anajak. A lot of people come in and say, "What do you recommend?" I'm like, "There's not one." You have to veer in one direction or the other, or make it work for both. The most important thing is, with all the big, bold flavors, you don't want wines that are too bold or too high in alcohol. You want to go the other direction, where you have earthiness, but in a form, you're choosing mineral wines instead of earthy wines, sort of, so to speak.
What I like is classic, worldly wines that speak of a place more than anything. When I pick a wine, I imagine drinking it with a certain dish. So even though you have a turkey, which is white meat, and we're always taught that white wine goes with white meat, in my head, I have all these other conflicting opinions about that. I think red wine is actually the best with turkey, especially the dark meat. But you know, it's kind of a fork in the road situation where either way you go, as long as you stick to the formula of wines that aren't too huge, full bodied, or high in alcohol, I think you're going to be just fine.
Just the other day, I got the latest newsletter from wine writer Alice Feiring, and she was talking about an aligoté, which is a wine I've never heard of before, but I understand it's a wine that intrigues you.
Ian Krupp: It certainly does intrigue me, because it used to be a very important grape variety and was even allowed to be part of the famous Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru in Burgundy. But everybody ripped it all up and planted Chardonnay in its place because it sold better. Aligoté has a little more acidity. It's a little bit more vegetal, a little lighter in body.
I've had some aligotés that blew my mind, especially from newer producers like the Chantereves Winery. They do single vineyard, biodynamic farming.
All this stuff is so transparent. It goes super well with vegetables. Even though it's the redheaded stepchild of Burgundy, I think it can be some of the most interesting and fun wines that you can drink. And there's a fun fact about aligoté — if you add a splash of crème de cassis, it becomes a kir cocktail, and that is one of my favorites for Thanksgiving. It goes well with the cranberry sauce.
So aligoté was the traditional variety for a kir?
Yes, it was, yes.
How interesting. Arielle, I'm wondering what kind of scientific role is played between the aromas that happen in drinking a wine and then actually eating? You're drinking something incredibly aromatic. It's liquid already, so your mouth doesn't have to masticate it and go through all the work of getting the flavor into that area of our mouth and nose. What happens, flavor-wise, when we pair?
Arielle Johnson: Interestingly, it's liquid, so we don't have to masticate it. But then, if you see a wine lover slurp their wine a little bit as they're tasting it, moving it around in your mouth can actually increase the surface area that has smells available to evaporate off of it. So the chewing action can make it more flavorful.
Everyone knows that taste is a huge part of flavor and some people have heard that smell is a big part of flavor. What is less well known is that the way that we smell when we experience flavor isn't sniffing through the nose. It actually goes backwards. So any food that's in our mouth, the smell molecules float gently up the back of our throat and enter our nasal cavity from the back, then bind to receptors, and then we get flavor signals. That's called retronasal olfaction.
In terms of pairing, when you are eating a bite of food, taking a sip of wine, if you have any sort of similar flavors in both things, you'll be firing off some of the same receptors, like synergistically. It'll increase those signals [to make them] greater than some of their parts. If you have contrasting flavors, you get a contrast enhancement. Some receptors shut off, others turn on then flick back and forth. You can get more flavors overall from both, from the pairing, than you would from having them on their own.
I love that. Whenever I think of that kind of aroma inhalation, I always think of that thing that cats do sometimes.
Arielle Johnson: That is actually using something called a Jacobson's organ, which is like a smell-adjacent sense that humans no longer have. The cats are basically huffing chemicals to sense it with this accessory organ that they have. I'm jealous, right?
That's so awesome. Ian, earlier, you mentioned that you look towards worldly wines that maybe don't have too much age on them, and you often hear people recommend Beaujolais as the sort of no-brainer pairing with Thanksgiving. Do you subscribe to that?
Ian Krupp: I actually do, not just because I'm a kind of a traditional wine person, but I think that Beaujolais, increasingly, are making more fascinating wines. It's the original natural wine, so to speak, because of the Gang of Four, the Kermit Lynch winemakers, who started doing it in the '70s and '80s as an experiment. It turned out that their form of winemaking created better wine, in some cases.
For me, when I look for certain Beaujolais wines, it's usually about the producer instead of what the vineyard name is or the village. If you stick to that formula, you can find some of the best wines that go with anything. I have a ton of Beaujolais at Anajak. I think it's the best wine for curries. I think it's really good for pork, things like that. So it's an exciting frontier, especially now.
Do you make a big distinction between Beaujolais and Beaujolais Nouveau?
Ian Krupp: Oh, yes, big, big difference. Beaujolais Nouveau is actually really just a celebratory wine for the vineyard workers. They make this wine for themselves to drink at the end of harvest. It's typically the least aged wine that you could ever drink. It's cool. It's really juicy and really fun, meant to be drunk right away, cold too, usually.
Beaujolais regular has to actually age a certain amount of time. It's usually released in the following spring. And then you have different levels of Beaujolais. So you have cru Beaujolais, maybe from a single village or single vineyard, and you typically age that a touch longer. So yeah, more mature wines with more body and depth and complexity, but both are fun.
Is it around now that the Beaujolais Nouveau comes out, in November?
Ian Krupp: Beaujolais Nouveau is scheduled for the third Thursday of November, so it coincides with Thanksgiving, usually, and if it gets on the boat fast enough, the rest of the world can have it by Thanksgiving. But instead, I recommend regular Beaujolais or cru Beaujolais instead of Nouveau. While Nouveau is fun, I think there are better options out there.
Can you give us an actual vintner, a maker?
Ian Krupp: Lately, I've been turned on to the wines of Gregoire Hoppenot, who's a fantastic enologist. He has worked for some of the best wineries in the Rhone and in Beaujolais, and he's starting to make these single vineyard Beaujolais that are really, really affordable, and he's farming biodynamic. Everything's perfect. The wines are exactly what they're supposed to be, and more. So I reached out, and we have a private bottling coming from him. It'll probably be here next week. It's fantastic. It's a Fleurie, my favorite little village in Beaujolais. Very floral, very elegant. It's just like violet flowers everywhere, plums and black cherries. It's got this sandy quartz minerality to it, too. It's, it's a whole vibe. We love it.
Arielle is a flavor scientist. Do you love all of these wine descriptors, or do they make you crazy?
Arielle Johnson: No, I do love them. A while ago, I was looking into the history of wine tasting notes, and the fashion for it has changed over the years. I think back in the mid-20th century, there was a lot more talk about the kind of the personality of the wines, like whether something was "noble" or" shy," or a lot of anthropomorphization. Now, you hear descriptors like "violet" or "vegetal" or "herbal" or "jammy." In a lot of cases, you're sensing these flavors. There's actually a lot of stuff on the molecular level in common between the notes that you smell in a wine and the thing that it makes you think of. So violet, for example, is often from a molecule called beta-ionone, which smells sort of like a violet-hyacinth thing. It's in a lot of fruits as a byproduct of vitamin A.
Ian Krupp: Okay, you're gonna have to repeat that beta what? I have a pen out.
Arielle Johnson: Just a regular everyday supernoid. It's called beta-ionone
Ian Krupp: I love it. Thank you for that.
Arielle Johnson: You're welcome.
I love this. I love being a fly on the wall in this conversation. Ian, do you want to throw another red wine suggestion at us.
Ian Krupp: Yes, I would. I really, I do this every year. I always bring a Nebbiolo to Thanksgiving. Like it's literally every single year. It's instinctual, because I think those are the most, you know, aromatically intense wines that you could get, especially reds. And it has, you know, earthiness, it has tannin, but it also has, like, gorgeous fruit aromas and floral aromas too, like dried roses and stuff like this. It's like the antithesis to cranberry sauce. It's the exact opposite flavor, but it wipes your palate very clean. It's light, you know, people think that Nebbiolo is a big, heavy wine, and it's actually really silky, like if it has enough age, or if it's good enough. And my favorite for that is Barolo. It's known as the king of Italian wine, and I think that my favorite these days, I've been tasting the wines from the Brandini sisters in La Morra and Barolo, and they had me taste a 2016 Cerretta. Oh, my goodness. So I flew it. I bought a glass for a whole week. Now I have zero left, but it was incredible.
So, I'm going to throw a curveball at you. Ian, do you also drink beer?
Ian Krupp: I sure do.
Yeah, okay, because I know that both Arielle and I are beer drinkers as well, and I tend to think of Thanksgiving as a time for me, at least that I can maybe bring, bring a bottle of, you know, a really strong triple something that I may not want to normally drink because it's going to just, you know, pin me to the floor. But in a meal like this that lasts so long and there are so many different flavors I can allow myself to have that. Do either of you have any thoughts on what you might want to recommend on the brew side?
Arielle Johnson: I like, you know, a decent amount of bitterness to kind of like clear the palate and balance things. And I might be old fashioned, but I love an old school west coast Pale Ale for that. I mean, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale kind of never steers me wrong if I'm going to be eating a kind of Thanksgiving-style meal.
Well, I love that. Give us permission.
Ian Krupp: You know what? That's funny. I've had multiple Thanksgivings with that same beer. I think they're on the same page. Like, seriously,
There you go.
Arielle Johnson: The vibes are vibing.
Ian’s Holiday Wine Selections
Bubbly: Champagne Bérèche et Fils, Brut Reserve
White: Chantereves Bourgogne Aligoté
Beaujolais: Domaine Gregoire Hoppenot Fleurie 'Les Moriers'
Barolo: R56 Brandini Agricola Brandini La Morra