Thanksgiving Wine Recommendations

Thanksgiving is such a great holiday – a time to give thanks for what we have, spend quality time with family and friends, and enjoy wonderful food and wine. This year, with our vaccinations under our belts, we have even more reason to celebrate. In honor of this wonderful holiday, I’d like to contribute some Thanksgiving wine recommendations. I hope you enjoy them.

Thank you to The Spruce Eats for their wonderful Thanksgiving wine recommendations meme.

Serve Sparkling Wine Front and Center

If you serve only one wine at your festive meal, serve Sparkling Wine or Champagne. These wines are perfect for the Thanksgiving dinner table because they carry a healthy dose of acidity, which complements the natural fats typical in many of Thanksgiving’s most popular side dishes. Also, they bring a celebratory flair to the table.

Very importantly, they are good palate cleansers. The Thanksgiving meal can feel a bit HEAVY. The moment you sip sparkling wine, your mouth is cleansed, and you feel very ready for another bite of food.

Sparkling wine doesn’t overtake or get overtaken. It holds up nicely to even the most serious parts of Thanksgiving, without standing out as being too strong or too wimpy.

Serve Acidic Whites

For the same reason that Sparkling Wine and Champagne are such great Thanksgiving accompaniments, acidic whites are the way to go. As you see from the meme, your best bets are Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio.

Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling are two excellent options. While fuller-bodied wines like Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay are crowd-pleasers, their bold and typically oaky notes are better suited to the roasted red meats of December’s holidays. If you love them, by all means, serve them.

Serve Low Tannin Reds

For festive meals, you often think of your best wines – perhaps a very special Cabernet you’ve been saving for many years. Truth be told, for Thanksgiving, a big, bad red doesn’t work very well, because it can overpower the turkey and stuffing. You’ll do much better choosing lower tannin, lighter reds. That doesn’t mean wimpy wines. It just means not over-the-top wines.

Pinot Noir is one of the most popular red choices for Thanksgiving because of its subtle earthy undertones and mushroom-inspired flavors.

Don’t Forget About Dessert

When it comes to your dessert, you want to make sure your wine is sweeter than your dessert. Having a wine that’s less sweet will result in unpleasant bitter flavors 🙁

My WineShop At Home Picks

I’ll end this article by sharing my WineShop At Home picks for this year’s Thanksgiving celebration. They don’t match the recommendations of The Spruce Eats exactly. But the whites have nice acidity, and the reds are not too tannic.

Sparkling

• Cadeau Brut Sparkling
• Semi-Seco Sparkling

Whites

• Fleur Bleu Sauvignon Blanc
• Terroir Cellars Sauvignon Blanc
• Monarch Riesling
• Joy Cellars Euphoria – a blend of 55% Riesling, 23% French Colombard, 12% Chardonnay and 10% Pinot Grigio

Reds

• Infinite Wisdom Shiraz
• Joy Cellars Jubilant – a blend of 43% Cabernet Frnac, 30% Syrah and 27% Zinfandel
• Terroir Cellars Grenache
• Family Ranch Red River Blend – a blend of 70% Syrah, 15% Merlot and 15% Ruby Cabernet

Dessert Wines

• Ceres Goddess – primarily Cabernet Franc
• Cookie Cellars Macaron – this fortified wine is made from Portugal’s Touriga Nacional grape

To place an order, please visit my website or call me at 650-714-7009. If you place your order in the next few weeks, you will get a great holiday discount.

I hope you enjoyed my Thanksgiving wine recommendations, and I hope you have a safe, happy, healthy and tasty Thanksgiving!