Skip the Cocktails This Thanksgiving

It’s a wine-and-brandy kind of holiday.

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MARTHA STEWART HAS THE PERFECT Thanksgiving cocktail for me. So, as far as I can tell, does everyone else. For the last few weeks, every food-and-wine-adjacent publication has been digging up its “30 Best Thanksgiving Cocktails” listicle and sending it around. There are tips for making them for a crowd. There is advice on how to choose a signature drink. There are recommended food pairings. And there are endless adaptations aimed at getting the seasonal flavors of Thanksgiving into the classic cocktail mode. Apple cider margaritas! Moscow mules with apple-flavored vodka! Pumpkin spice penicillins! (To be perfectly fair, I made up the last two.) I read the lists and gnash my teeth.

What is so offensive about these creations is the palpable sense of something being shoehorned where it does not belong. A cocktail is different from an aperitif, a palate-opener intended to prepare you for a meal. It is different from a classic well drink on jack-and-coke lines, a workhouse designed to get enough rum into your system to permit you to ask girls to dance. And a cocktail is not really like wine, which has been in a close embrace with food for millennia, ever since we buried the first qvevris deep in a cave, to the point where it can feel a little impoverished to have one without the other. I have listened to the tattooed bartenders assuring me otherwise, I have tried their clever tasting menus with a cocktail for each course. I always think, “How ingenious! Now if only we had some wine.”

I like Robert Farrar Capon’s take on cocktails and their existential problem:

I enjoy cocktails (other than cute ones), but I dislike them before dinner, and think them gauche after. (Some of them, like the martini, are marvelous inventions, but man has yet to find a civilized use for them.)

I think he is correct. A cocktail is an amuse-bouche. A cocktail is a cupcake. It exists as part of nothing and as a precursor to nothing. It exists out of time and season. It is a fussy and frivolous demonstration of luxury and technique for its own sake, like a niche perfume aimed at conjuring up a specific moment in a butterfly garden. You do not serve a cocktail at seven o’clock with braised chuck roast. You duck into a cocktail bar (ideally during working hours) to meet a friend for a glorious, stolen hour of dishing over delicate stems and frothy finishes.

To be perfectly clear: I am not against cocktails. I love them in the way I love a vintage thrift store find, a lovely wisp of mint green chiffon, not, strictly speaking, “practical” or “appropriate” or “flattering,” but worth wearing at least once before it falls apart entirely. I love and honor that doomed little wisp of chiffon, but it’s not what I build a wardrobe on. I love cocktails, but I resent how thoroughly they have colonized the American ideal of festivity.

I can handle the one or two or three design-forward craft cocktail establishments, all serving more or less the same thing, that always seem to spring up (often where lowly and honest bars once stood) when a neighborhood is turning fashionable. I understand that the American cocktail revival paved the way for everyone who enjoys cultivating such a finicky refinement in their tipple that Miller High Life alone no longer satisfies them. But if people are serving cocktails at Thanksgiving, there are truly no more worlds left for the Brandy Alexander to conquer.

It is hard to imagine something more inimical to the spirit of the cocktail than Thanksgiving. It is, in most cases, a large, busy gathering—not a scene that lends itself to mixing individual drinks. It is intensely traditional, with the sacred and unvarying main dish a nationally prescribed, load-bearing component of the whole affair. Such variation as exists from family to family is, if anything, defended even more fiercely—just try to suggest skipping your great aunt’s mother-in-law’s Hungarian kiffles this year, and see what happens. It is a palace for magnificence, not a laboratory for ingenuity and innovation. And finally, Thanksgiving is all about the food—not cupcakes, not clever amuses-bouches, not elegant little cocktail-party canapés, but meaty drumsticks, vats of mashed potatoes glistening with gravy, pyramids of dinner rolls. Thanksgiving is a hymn to the basic macronutrients: fat, protein, carbs.

You don’t need cocktails with all this hulking, corn-fed majesty. You need some really wonderful wine. Thanksgiving is not a party, it is a feast. It is a stupendous meal. Abundance, and simple things done beautifully, is the order of the day, not cleverness or chic. You don’t need a house cocktail. You need a wine that loves turkey.

I’m not unreasonable. I’m not saying wine and only wine should be permitted. You’ll need beer for the uncles who don’t drink anything else. A really excellent cider, the color of autumn sunsets, could be even better than wine, if harder to find. And I’m not even against hard liquor. One of my favorite parts of the night is when the last dessert plates stacked with apples, pumpkin, pastry, and cream have been pushed away, belts have been loosened, and the tiny crystal glasses come out. Fragrant vapors of amber calvados or water-clear pear brandy rise as you lift your glass. Impossible to make room for anything more—but you do, for one last heady, sensorial delight, the most intense of all.

Among the many crimes of the cocktail is the fact that many makers of fruit brandies feel the need to market their wares as cocktail ingredients rather than standalone drinks to sip for a meditative hour or digestifs to close out an excellent meal. But an eau-de-vie worth drinking is worth appreciating on its own terms. It captures the heart of the pear and the apple, the harvest and the autumn. Bushel after bushel of fruit goes into a few ounces of brandy, in a process that simultaneously strips, concentrates, and magnifies. The end product is simple, and magnificent. It is a reverent tribute to a superfluity of blessings. It is everything that a Thanksgiving feast should be.