Pairings: Pinot noir with shellfish

Our Wine of the Week, River Road Family Vineyards & Winery 2014 Stephanie's Cuvée Pinot Noir, has a quality that fans of this varietal consider essential, delicacy. The wine splashes lightly across the palate and lingers like mist after a gentle rain.

The wine is sophisticated and beautifully balanced, so that no single flavor stands out from the rest. If you want to search for specific tastes, you'll find hints of cedar, new leather, plum, fresh tobacco, dried ginger, Queen Anne cherries and orange zest, especially if you have a vivid imagination. Your cranky uncle who likes high alcohol fruit bombs might grouse about the wine, but everyone else should love it. Its delicacy, lightness and brightness make it extremely food friendly.

Because we finally have fresh Dungeness crab, consider this wine to serve alongside crab Louis, as it will engage perfectly with the voluptuous dressing. It is excellent with risotto, especially with mushrooms, beets, carrots or winter squash. Fall's wild mushrooms are fabulous matches. It is a good companion to turkey, especially the dark meat, and the traditional accompaniments.

Duck, lamb, bacon, caramelized onions, tomato-based soups and stews such as cioppino, lentils with cotechino and roasted eggplant are good matches, too. If you want to make Thanksgiving dinner soar, serve a puree of celery root and potatoes, or celery root, parsnips and potatoes instead of plain mashed potatoes, with the wine alongside.

Most of us have had our Thanksgiving menus planned for some time now, so today's recipe is for something different, a seafood stew that takes advantage of the very last of the year's tomato crop.

Portuguese Shellfish Stew

Serves 6 to 8

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 pound linguica, diced

2 yellow onions, sliced

8 garlic cloves

- Kosher salt

6 ounces prosciutto, diced

1 cup tomato concassé (see Note below)

1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1/4 cup minced Italian parsley

1 cup white wine

2 pounds PEI mussels, scrubbed

3 pounds manila or cherrystone clams, scrubbed

- Picked meat from 1 Dungeness crab

1 lemon, cut in wedges

- Sourdough hearth bread, hot

Put the olive oil in a large heavy skillet set over medium heat, add the linguica and sauté, stirring frequently, until the sausage gives up most of its fat. Drain off all but a little of the fat, add the onion, reduce the heat to low and sweat the onions until they are very soft and fragrant, about 20 to 25 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté 2 minutes more. Season with salt.

Add the prosciutto, tomato concassé, red pepper flakes and Italian parsley and simmer for 5 minutes. Increase the heat to medium, add the wine, arrange the mussels and clams in the pan hinge side down, cover the pan and cook until the shellfish just open, about 5 to 7 minutes. Uncover, scatter the crab on top, cover and cook for 1 to 2 minutes, just to heat the crab through.

Remove from the heat, let rest 5 minutes, and serve with lemon wedges and hot bread alongside

Note: Tomato concassé is fresh tomato pulp. To make it, peel 1 or 2 large heavy tomatoes, cut them in half through their equators and squeeze out the juice and gel. Chop the tomato flesh as finely as possible, scoop it into a strainer set over a bowl, stir in a teaspoon of salt, and let drain for about 15 minutes. What remains in the strainer is the concassé.

Michele Anna Jordan is author of the new “Good Cook's” series. Email her at michele@micheleannajordan.com and visit her blog at pantry.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.