175 Bottles Post 03: A Dim Sum Christmas Eve
Wine: 2023 Piú Gioia Pino Grigio
The winter holidays are fraught with food! Starting in November, we plan and eat elaborate meals that we just don’t eat any other time of the year. There is, of course, the Thanksgiving feast with its requisite turkey and all those carb-loaded sides and desserts. Then a month later comes Christmas with turkey or ham and more starchy side goodies. And of course there are the cookies! At our house, we also do a roast beef Christmas eve dinner, as well as a pork and sauerkraut New Year’s Day dinner. So, yeah, lots of food!
Every once in a while, we get bored and decide to switch things up a bit. That’s when we look to other traditions and cultures. There’s a common narrative out there that Jews get Chinese food for Christmas. Sometimes the lunar new year falls close to Christmas. And of course, there’s the inspirational Christmas dinner from “A Christmas Story” movie, which has been a traditional must-watch at our house for many years. What I’m trying to say, is that quite often we have Chinese food sometime during the holidays, if not on Christmas Day itself, then on a day close to it.
And so, as Christmas neared this year, I found myself not wanting to make any sort of traditional Christmas eve dinner. And as always, I reached for a familiar and beloved alternative. Only this year, instead of orange chicken or sesame beef, we decided to make it Dim Sum! Off to our local Asian market I went, bringing home a variety of dumplings, pot stickers, shumai, and bao to steam and fry. Here are some of them.
With all this steamed goodness, we decided to crack open another one of our 175 bottles as it had been almost a month since the last bottle. This time, our choice was the 2023 Piú Gioia Pino Grigio, a wine advertised on the website as light, refreshing, and citrusy with flavors of green apple, pear, and melon. The website also called it “lean,” an adjective I don’t understand applied to wine. The verdict from my family? We liked it. For a dry wine, it was surprisingly mellow and buttery, fresh and super easy to drink with no astringent kick or bitter aftertaste. We all agreed about the apple, melon, and citrus scents and flavors. All in all, it was a perfect bottle to drink with all that steamed food. The wine cut through the doughy bao and oily potstickers perfectly without camouflaging any of the flavors of the food. And it went really well with the veggie flavors of the shumai and dumplings. After dinner, it also tasted pretty good with shortbread cookies! The next day was Christmas, so we would open our first red. Stay tuned.
