Thanksgiving : WINE : Wine for Thanksgiving: Sweet and Simple

It was difficult to tell my friend that he had just wasted a bottle of 1962 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild. After all, pulling the cork on that wine had been a magnanimous and generous gesture--and the wine itself was wonderful.

The problem was the dinner: Thanksgiving. And the wine simply didn’t go with the sort of food he and his wife prepared. Here we had a marvelous dry red wine, loaded with complex scents and tastes, and a sublime texture, and I couldn’t appreciate it.

The food was quite traditional: turkey loaded with sage; dressing with walnuts, onions and raisins; candied yams; cranberry sauce flavored with orange rind, and mashed potatoes with roasted garlic and blackened onions.

The wine never had a chance.

The aromas in the room were wonderful, and swirling the wine, I realized there was a battle going on that an old Bordeaux like this was doomed to lose. On top of the aromatic background was the taste. The garlic, the sage and the sweetness in the yams and dressing all conspired to change the taste of the wine, to reduce its delicate nuances to a merely dry, less-than-flavorful, metallic-tasting liquid.

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This dinner, more than a decade ago, was yet another lesson in how the best plans with wine and food gang aft agley. The aromas and tastes of certain foods are simply so strong they do battle with wines, even great ones. I can’t imagine traditional red wine being very good with such a dinner because of the sugar in so much of the food, which plays havoc with the taste of dry red wine.

When choosing a wine for Thanksgiving, with its yams and cranberries, I would go for an off-dry Gewurztraminer, Chenin Blanc or even Riesling, so the sweetness of the wine can compete with the sweetness of the dishes and permit the flavors of both to blend. Chardonnay is generally too dry and oak-scented to make much of an impact with these foods.

Among the great Gewurztraminers you could shoot for are those from California wineries: 1992 Navarro Vineyards ($9.50); 1992 Thomas Fogarty Winery ($11.50); 1991 Z Moore ($9.50); 1992 Claiborne & Churchill Winery ($9.50), or 1992 Adler Fels Winery ($9). All are made relatively dry, with less than 1% of residual sugar. If you want a sweeter version, try Fetzer’s, a bargain at $5.50. Gewurztraminers from the Alsace, though I love them with other foods, generally are so dry with this sort of food they don’t work as well as the California versions.

A “nouveau” version of Gewurztraminer that I found very attractive and not too sweet is the 1993 from Alexander Valley Vineyards ($8), a stylishly floral and spice-scented wine with good acidity to balance a trace of sweetness.

Because of its brisk acidity and festive nature, I also like to serve sparkling wine with the main dish. Among the best are the non-vintage Mumm Napa Blanc de Noirs ($15), Roederer Estate Brut ($16), Scharffenberger Blanc de Blancs ($17), Maison Deutz Brut ($15) and 1988 Piper-Sonoma Brut ($13).

In the last few years, sales of bubbly have declined, so these wines are usually discounted heavily, and almost all may now be found in the $10-$12 range. An excellent lower-priced version is the Australian import Seaview Brut ($8 or less), which is clean, fresh and perfectly balanced.

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Another great choice for Thanksgiving is dry rose wine, and the two best on the market are both 1992s: from Joseph Phelps (called Grenache Rose) and from Joe Heitz (called Grignolino Rose). The Phelps wine, at $9, is more expensive than the Heitz ($5.50), but is an exciting wine worth a try.

But white wines can’t do the job all by themselves. The non-sweet foods on the table, such as the turkey and the mashed potatoes, call for light red wines. And because Thanksgiving dinners always draw a wide variety of people with widely divergent tastes, I always serve both a white and a red.

This way you appeal to more people. You can also follow a taste of the yams with the slightly sweet white wine and follow the taste of the turkey with the red. But the red wine can’t just be any red. Ideally it should be a light one made to be quaffed, preferably chilled.

The best such wine is called Beaujolais, or more specifically, Nouveau Beaujolais. And today, Nov. 18, is the traditional day for the French to release their Nouveau, which has for the last couple of decades been done with every flourish known to man.

The problem is the price. To get Nouveau Beaujolais to the United States as fast as possible to celebrate the release of the first wine of the just-completed harvest, the French air-freight the wine here. This bumps the price well above the $6 a bottle it ought to be. I am opposed to paying $8 and $9 for Nouveau.

This is especially true when you have such delightful alternatives as 1993 Beringer Nouveau Gamay Beaujolais, which sells for $7 and is almost always discounted to below $5.50. This wine is fresh, grape juice-scented and perfect for chilling and swilling.

Beaujolais is made for these kinds of festive occasions where gulping, not pontificating, is the order of the day. Beaujolais, the only red wine that benefits from being deeply chilled, often has a cranberry-ish aroma that matches beautifully with many of the sweeter dishes found on the traditional Thanksgiving table.

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Another excellent Beaujolais is 1993 Robert Pecota Gamay Beaujolais ($6.75), which is a deeper, more complex wine than the Beringer, with a delicate peppery note in the aroma. Traditionally, the best French version of Nouveau is from Georges Duboeuf.

Lighter-styled Pinot Noirs also are excellent with turkey and trimmings. Two of the best are Saintsbury’s “Garnet,” the 1992 version of which retails for $10, and Carneros Creek Winery’s excellent Fleur de Carneros; the 1992 sells for $9.50.

A real sleeper is 1992 Olivet Lane Pinot Noir ($11), from the same Russian River vineyard from which the famed Williams & Selyem Winery buys. The wine, part of the San Francisco-based Pelligrini Bros. Winery, is made by Merry Edwards, former winemaker at Mount Eden Vineyards and Matanzas Creek Winery. The wine is light but not lacking in flavor or richness. It’s a wine that keeps enticing you to take another sip.