wine guy wednesday

CultureMap's Wine Guy Chris Shepherd reveals a feast of reds for Thanksgiving

Our wine guy recommends chillable reds this Thanksgiving.

Photo by Julia Casbarian

Editor's note: Long before Chris Shepherd became a James Beard Award-winning chef, he developed enough of a passion for wine to work at Brennan's of Houston as a sommelier. He maintains that interest to this day. When Chris expressed interest in writing about wine-related topics for CultureMap, we said yes.

In this week's column, he offers suggestions for what to pair with your Thanksgiving meal, whether you're serving turkey or burgers. Take it away, Chris.

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It’s Thanksgiving time. And, no, it’s still not Cab season. Sorry, folks. So what you should you open on this beautiful family holiday? Let’s all give thanks to chilled red wines.

Yes, it’s okay to pull it right out of the cooler. It goes well with everything you’ll be eating onThanksgiving. Let’s talk Lambrusco, Beaujolais, Cerasuolo. Think of it like stepping up your rosé game.

A few years ago, everyone was saying to drink rosé with Thanksgiving. They’re not wrong, but it’s time to add some backbone.

Let’s talk about five different wines you should be drinking this year. Important note: when you’re looking for wines that are coming from outside the U.S., you want to pay attention to the importer. Look for importers that carry wines you truly love. If you like a wine, look to see who imports it, and then look to see what else they’re importing. It’s often an indicator of quality and style. So I’ll be sharing the importer in addition to the producer with theseThanksgiving wines.

Tiberio Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo. Do not show up at your family’s house with just one bottle. You’ll need three to four minimum. Coming in at around $20 retail, it’s technically a rosé but with more structure. This is a wine you can start with and finish with. It keeps the party going.

It’s imported by The Sorting Table, which carries other wines of awesomeness like Dumaine Dujac.

Let’s go into Beaujolais. The next few wines are made with Gamay grapes. We know it as Beaujolais, but Beaujolais has gotten a bad rap.

Beaujolais Nouveau is a red wine made from Gamay grapes produced in the Beaujolais region of France. It’s fermented for just a few weeks before being released for sale on the third Thursday of November. Distributors famously race to get the first bottles to different markets around the globe.

The wine is made using carbonic maceration, whole berry anaerobic fermentation, which emphasizes fruit flavors without extracting bitter tannins from the grape skins. Grapes are loaded and sealed into a large container that is filled with carbon dioxide. Grapes that are gently crushed at the bottom of the container by the weight of the grapes start to ferment, emitting more CO2. All this carbon dioxide causes fermentation to take place inside the uncrushed grapes (without access to oxygen, hence "anaerobic fermentation"). The resulting wine is fresh, fruity, and very low in tannins — a guzzler that lacks finesse.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I want you to try some of the best producers of Gamay in the Beaujolais region.

Bonnet Cotton Côte de Brouilly “Le Grillés.” These wines are juicy and fun to drink. They have structure, they have depth, they have funk. Forget the cranberry sauce, and just drink this. This is imported by Paris Wine Company, which imports some of my favorite wines — fresh, clean, and leaning toward the natural side. They’re finding smaller producers who do cool things and bringing them here.

Now, let’s move on to the Gang of Four. These producers fought to change the way people think about Beaujolais. Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Guy Breton, and Jean-Paul Thévenet all champion organic farming, hand-harvesting ripe fruit, and a winemaking philosophy of “nothing added, nothing taken away.”

This is not your grandparents’ Beaujolais. It’s the evolution of what Beaujolais should be — earth, structure, and finesse. A really amazing food wine, whether you’re eating ham, turkey, or cold fried chicken. I’d even say to buck the Thanksgiving tradition of turkey since you’ll probably have a hard time getting one, and make some burgers.

If you want to be the winner of the holiday, look for these wines in magnums. Morgon from Jean Foillard is a favorite of mine, and it definitely comes in magnum. I’ll be drinking a magnum of Morgon on Thanksgiving this year, gifted to me by the crew at Birdie’s in Austin. Buy one, bring one, give one to your friend.

Kermit Lynch imports the Gang of Four. Kermit Lynch started as a wine shop in Berkeley and became an importer. They import some of the greatest wines from Italy and France — names like Domaine Tempier, Champagne Paul Bara … you get the idea. These people know what they’re doing.

If you have a Christmas Vacation moment this Thanksgiving, don’t worry. You probably didn’t let your turkey rest.

Side note: if your turkey has an internal thermometer, it’s set to pop above 175 degrees.Technically, by health code standards, 165 is fully cooked, which means you pull your turkey out at 160. Let it rest. It will continue to cook and stay moist and delicious. I encourage you to email me with all of your turkey questions. I’ll respond to your email, but I’ll also go live on Instagram answering all of your questions on Sunday, November 20.

We have a saying. “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” But we do have a solution: Lini 910 Lambrusco dell’Emilia. It’s not a sweet style of Lambrusco, but it will help with juiciness. If the moment comes and you didn’t follow my directions, and your turkey is dry when you carve into it, just pour this. It’s imported by Winebow, a good importer of Italian wines.

Chillable reds all the time, especially in Houston. As I write this, it’s 80 degrees in November. Go ‘Stros. Happy Thanksgiving.

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Contact our Wine Guy via email at chris@chrisshepherdconcepts.com.

Chris Shepherd won a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest in 2014. He recently parted ways with Underbelly Hospitality, a restaurant group that currently operates four Houston restaurants: Wild Oats, GJ Tavern, Underbelly Burger, and Georgia James. The Southern Smoke Foundation, a non-profit he co-founded with his wife Lindsey Brown, has distributed more than $10 million to hospitality workers in crisis through its Emergency Relief Fund.

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eat real food

Houston DJ-turned-TikTok star cooks up a cult following one recipe at a time

Courtesy of Uncle Dibbz

Uncle Dibbz, a.k.a. A.H. Bowden, has built a devoted following for his viral recipes.

For the past month, Uncle Dibbz has been, shall we say, going ham on social media with the myriad videos of alternative Thanksgiving dishes. He’s dropped how-to clips for such recipes as Cajun-roasted turkey, honey-baked ham/hens, oven-bag turkey, and six-piece fried turkey (to go). Basically, if you don’t want to cook a bland ol’ Butterball this Turkey Day, Dibbz has you covered.

Who is Dibbz, you say? Well, he’s a North Jersey-born, Georgia-bred, Houston-based chef who’s been building quite the foodie rep online. Several videos across his TikTok, Instagram and YouTube pages, from his Cajun-boiled fried chicken (2 million on IG) to his “Propose to Me Pasta” (12.3 million on TikTok), has amassed millions of views. But Dibbz (government name: A.H. Bowden) wasn’t always a culinary content creator. He used to spin music back in Atlanta as DJ DiBiase, named after retired wrestler Ted “The Million Dollar Man” DiBiase. “DiBiase is a mouthful to say, so people just always call me ‘D’ or ‘Dibbz’ for short,” says Bowden, 37, during a Zoom interview.

@uncledibbz PROPOSE To Me PASTA 💍 🍝 Trust your Uncle! This SEAFOOD Pasta will seal the deal 👌🏽 Get my recipe below ⬇️ or on uncledibbz.com [@uncledibbz Link in Bio] 🌐 **Ingredients:** - 8 ounces spaghetti - 1 lb mixed seafood (shrimp, scallops, crab meat, etc.) - 2 tablespoons olive oil - Fresh chopped basil - 2 cloves garlic, minced - 1/2 cup white wine - 1/4 cup heavy cream - 2 tablespoons unsalted butter - Salt and pepper to taste - Uncle Dibbz Delta Dust [link in bio] - Fresh parsley, chopped (for garnish) - Grated Parmesan cheese (for garnish) **Instructions:** 1. Cook the spaghetti pasta according to the package instructions until al dente. Drain and set aside. 2. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the minced garlic, chopped basil and sauté for about 1 minute until fragrant. 3. Add the mixed seafood to the skillet. Season with Uncle Dibbz Delta Dust to taste and cook for 2-3 minutes until cooked through. Remove the seafood from the skillet and set aside. 4. Pour in the white wine to the skillet and let it simmer for 2 minutes, allowing the alcohol to cook off. 5. Stir in the heavy cream, butter, Uncle Dibbz Delta Dust seasoning, salt, and pepper. Cook for another 2-3 minutes until the sauce thickens slightly. 6. Add the cooked spaghetti and cooked mixed seafood to the skillet. Toss everything together until well coated with the sauce. 7. Remove from heat and garnish with fresh parsley and grated Parmesan cheese. 8. Serve hot and enjoy the flavorful Seafood Spaghetti. That's good Shawty! #UncleDibbz #ThatsGoodShawty #Pasta #marryme #proposal #bride #wife #husband #relationshipgoals #datenight #easyrecipe #seafood #cajun #cooking #fyp #foryou #viral #houston ♬ original sound - Uncle Dibbz 🍴

He was making a nice living as a DJ, even serving as rapper Big K.R.I.T.’s touring DJ for a while. But when the pandemic hit, the gigs obviously dried up.

“I was living in Miami at the time,” he says. “And, you know, when you have a lot of time on your hands to think – but also need to figure out a way to, you know, sustain an income and everything like that – the ideas start coming,”

Like most DJs at that time, he was doing live mixes on Instagram. But his days throwing cookout parties in Atlanta inspired him to start doing his cooking videos, where he used his very own seasoning. Of course, he had a lemon pepper blend, which he used in a lemon pepper hot wings video that currently has over a half-million views on TikTok.

“I'm about to go live to DJ later that night, and my phone was just going off with orders,” he recalls. “So I'm like, where are these orders coming from? And it's not from my friends. I'm seeing the cities and the states. I don't know these people.”

Thanks to his videos, which usually end with him saying his signature line “That’s good shawty!” (that’s also the name of his cookbook he released last year), Dibbz went into the seasoning business full time. He eventually hired another person to help send out the piles of orders he was receiving.

He even got an order from former Dallas Cowboy Emmitt Smith, one of his favorite athletes. “I remember doing a book report on him when I was in fourth grade,” he boasts.

Although Dibbz has a flair for making meals that border on decadent, he’s an ardent practitioner of cooking with natural ingredients, especially in his seasoning. He has several low-sodium seasoning, including Bebe’s Salt Free – named after his mother, who had open-heart surgery a few weeks before the pandemic started.

“I don't think a lot of people understand the amount of toxins and chemicals that go into a lot of these seasonings,” he says. “You're starting to see it in the news now. A lot of the foods with certain dyes are being taken off the shelves and things like that.’

Soon, Dibbz moved himself and his new business to Houston, a favorite place to perform as well as a town whose hip-hop got him into music. He cites local chopped-and-screwed gods DJ Screw, Michael 5000 Watts, and OG Ron C as his holy trinity of influences. To give props to the music of his new home, he created a hot sauce – called HXT Sauce – whose uncharacteristically large bottle resembles Promethazine cough syrup (aka the key ingredient in lean, the preferred purple cocktail for the city’s rap community).

“It's not necessarily about promoting that usage,” he says. “But, at the same time, it’s just a homage to one of the factors and influences of screwed-and-chopped music.”

Dibbz still indulges in spinning records from time to time. The Waxaholics’ DJ Big Reeks has gotten him to break out the vinyl a few times during his Thursday-night sets at Alley Kat Bar & Lounge in Midtown. But creating new recipes, dropping delicious content and proving you can eat and live in a hearty, healthy fashion still remains his full-time mission.

“I’m not just talking about eating cauliflower rice all day and every day, but just eat real food,” he says. “We're eating fake food. That's the bottom line. We're eating fake food and my whole purpose is to inspire people to eat real food and that starts with real ingredients, real herbs, you know – real natural seasonings.”

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