Thanksgiving Wine Pairings

H,i I'm Jordan Salcito. I'm here at the Anfora Wine Bar with the wonderful very talented owner, Joe Campanale, for eHow.com, and today we're going to talk about Thanksgiving wines. Thanksgiving is a great time for everyone to get together and you know, you have your aunt who brings the casserole and then you probably made the turkey and there's definitely some cranberry sauce and some sweet potatoes. Jell-O salad. Jell-O salad, so there's all of these different flavors and we always get asked what kind of wine is the perfect match for every single one of these dishes so I think that there's no one perfect wine to go with everything but you can sort of hedge your bets. You can choose very versatile wines that will pair with a variety of dishes. What are some of your favorites? My mind is still stuck on this Jell-O salad, so I'm thinking Riesling, but I also think I love Riesling in general, really bright and fresh and crisp and high in acidity and I think that that's a great wine to go with a variety of these dishes. It's going to pair with your Jell-O salad, but it's also going to pair really well with your turkey if you want something with a little bit of richness and structure, something that's dry or even slightly off dry. Albert Boxler is one of my favorite producers. Yeah, so Riesling is a really great, very aromatic white wine. If you wanted to go for a red wine, I'd say to choose something that has some really great crisp bright acidity like Barbera from Italy or one of my favorites is a wine called Beaujolais and I know a lot of us might have had Beaujolais before and it might not have always necessarily been the best wine but there's increasingly a group of producers who are making wines in a natural and real way and you can get the very, very, very best example of Beaujolais for under $20 a bottle. So maybe it's a little bit more of a splurge than you'd normally do but it's still the best example and they can be really delicious and Beaujolais is a medium or light bodied wine. It does have some cranberry notes to it which will pair really well but it's that acidity that makes it versatile and what acidity does in the wine is it cleanses off your palette and makes you ready for another bite. So if you're having a bunch of different dishes, having a crisp white wine or a red wine that's really juicy like a Beaujolais would be a really good call. And these are also wines that you can get in a large format, so. Jordan and her husband are notorious for bringing large formats or magnums. Magnums, well magnums are fun. Magnums show you care and magnums are also a great value because then you only have to carry one bottle from the store instead of two bottles from the store. That's a really good point. Something also that I really like to do with Thanksgiving or any meal where you're going to be tasting a lot of different foods is to do some sparkling wine because sparkling wine isn't just something that you can do a cheers with and it's certainly really fun for an aperitif but sparkling wine especially when they're good sparkling wines are essentially just wines with bubbles and the bubbles act very similar to the way that acidity does where it cleanses off your palette and gets you really excited and ready to eat something else. So I'd recommend using a sparkling wine as a dinner wine. Now champagne is great. It's a sommelier favorite but it can be really pricey. A really good Cava could approximate some of those drier Earthier flavors of a champagne. Most red wines actually have a little bit more structure than white wines because of tannin and when you're talking about Thanksgiving dinner or Thanksgiving holidays there's really nothing with so many, with so much, there are no dishes or few dishes with so much structure that you need a lot of tannin so, you know, another great option is actually a Sicilian wine and it seemed appropriate to mention since Rachael is from Sicily, but the grape is Frappato and it's almost like a Beaujolais with even a little bit more acidity. There is a producer called Arianna Occhipinti who is doing great things and there are certainly others as well. Nero D'avola is a grape down in the Southern part of Sicily as well that's very popular, very versatile like Joe was saying. The acidity really just cleanses your palette and makes you ready to enjoy your next bite of Thanksgiving meal. You know Jordan, that's such a good point. Sicily I think is the most exciting place in all of Italy if not one of the most exciting places in the world for wine right now. There are producers who are rediscovering these ancient grapes that are native to Sicily and don't go anywhere else like the ones that Jordan mentioned, Nero D'avola and Frappato and one of my favorite places in Sicily is on the active volcano of Mt. Etna and there's just a really dangerous and thrilling place to make wine and the wines themselves are so dangerous and thrilling. They're smoky, they're Earthy. They have that vibrant acidity. They remind you of Pinot Noir that's been hanging out at a barbecue. That's such a great description, such a great description. Thanks, and because of that they're also very versatile. Remember when you're pairing with a lot of different foods you want really versatile wines, wines that aren't so particular, wines that have a lot of acidity and I think that you get that from Sicilian wines. Now they do make their fair share of Cabernet and Syrah and all the French grapes and in Sicily they can do them really well but what's exciting is all these producers who are using the native grapes and making them in a very very natural and balanced way. They have such a sense of place so you can actually sort of take yourself on a trip to Sicily when you stick your nose into one of these glasses. Regardless of what wine you choose we hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving and a great holiday dinner. Thanks so much for joining Joe and me here on eHow.com. Cheers. Cheers.