There is a particular pleasure in a wine dinner: no menu decisions, no pairing anxiety, just a sequence of courses and glasses arriving as a server explains what the winemaker intended. The Red, White, and Rosé dinner held at Char 32 in Point Clear captured that pleasure exactly — five French courses paired with five French wines, served on a summer Thursday evening in one of Baldwin County’s most intimate dining rooms.
The dinner, presented by the newsletter at chef-owner Daneen Buck’s steakhouse inside the historic Point Clear Swim and Tennis Club, was built around the wines of Seth Hargett’s ABM Wines, and it doubled as a showcase for the local suppliers who give Gulf Coast kitchens their character: oysters from the farms of Mobile Bay, peaches from Chilton County, corn from a Point Clear farm market, and pottery from a Fairhope artisan.
The setting
The dining room was set with black tablecloths as a canvas for centerpieces of palmetto fronds and lemons, dotted with ceramic barnacle-like candle holders made by potter Shelley Leigh, whose Fairhope studio work has become a fixture at Eastern Shore tables. On arrival, guests chose between a chilled glass of champagne or an Old Scenic 98 Old Fashioned — bourbon from Judge Roy Bean Spirits mixed at the bar — while conversation moved from the weather to the first course in the unhurried rhythm Char 32 is known for.
The room itself does half the work. Char 32 occupies a corner of the Point Clear Swim and Tennis Club, and the small kitchen’s tasting-menu pacing suits a wine dinner perfectly: courses arrive when the kitchen is ready, not when the clock says so, and the service never lets a glass sit empty long enough to wonder about the next pour.
Course by course
The first course set the bar high: oysters on the half shell from Admiral Shellfish Company, the farm on the Fort Morgan Peninsula where Gulf tides rolling across the widest part of Mobile Bay tumble the oysters naturally, building the deep, meaty cup the farm is known for. The salinity — fresh Gulf water ebbing and flowing with each tide — is the farm’s signature, and paired with a 2022 Domaine d’Elise Chablis, the mineral-on-mineral match was the kind of pairing that converts wine-dinner skeptics on the spot.
Course two brought a salad of grilled Chilton County peaches with pork belly, crumbled cheese, and tomatoes, paired with the Domaine de Saint Sér Cuvée Prestige Rosé 2023 — a Burgundian rosé built for exactly the kind of evening where guests admit, as several did, that they could drink rosé all day. The third course paired one of the night’s best dishes with one of its best wines: black grouper stuffed with crab meat, served over Devotion corn maque choux from McKinsey Farm Market in Point Clear, with a Pouilly-Fumé — the Loire Valley sauvignon blanc — cutting cleanly through the richness of the crab.
The fourth course surprised the table: a Gournay cheese-crusted filet of beef, paired not with the red everyone expected but with a white Château d’Angludet-worthy Bordeaux blanc that Hargett defended with the confidence of a man who has made the argument before. He was right — the beef was tender enough to surrender to the fork, and the white’s acidity worked where a heavy red would have smothered the crust. Dinner closed with a rich chocolate pot de crème and, at last, the red the room had been waiting for: a 2019 Château de la Jaubertie Mirabelle from Bergerac, dark and generous, arriving with the dessert course as if it had been waiting all evening for the invitation.
The people at the table
A wine dinner is only as good as its table company, and this one had plenty. Hargett walked the room between pours, explaining Burgundy’s labyrinth of villages and why a white Bordeaux belongs anywhere near a steak. Servers moved through the courses with the timing of people who had rehearsed the pacing until it disappeared. And Buck — who opened Char 32 in 2018 after years running kitchens across the Eastern Shore — worked the room the way she always does, as if every guest were a friend who happened to be hungry.
The local sourcing was the quiet theme of the night. The oysters came from a working farm on the Fort Morgan Peninsula; the corn came from a farm market down the road; the pottery on the tables and the bourbon in the Old Fashioned came from within a short drive. It is a model more Gulf Coast restaurants are embracing, and when the ingredients are this close to home, the pairings almost arrange themselves.
What’s next
Word at dinner was that the wine-dinner series would continue eastward, with the next edition announced for Dharma Blue in Pensacola — a reminder that these evenings have become a traveling showcase for Gulf Coast kitchens and their suppliers. Guests at the Char 32 dinner raised hands enthusiastically when the date was announced, which is about as reliable a review as any restaurant event gets.
As the wine writer Michael Broadbent put it, “Drinking good wine with good food in good company is one of life’s most civilized pleasures.” A Thursday in Point Clear made a strong case. For anyone who has not been to a wine dinner — or who has been meaning to get back to one — the format solves the eternal dilemma of ordering: you simply show up, and the food, the wine, and the conversation take care of the rest.
Keep an eye on the newsletter’s dining calendar for the next pairing dinner. Seats at these tables go quickly, and after an evening like this one, it is easy to understand why.