For that big Thanksgiving meal, choose wines that won’t weigh you down.
By Ray Isle | October 2023
When it comes to what to pour for Thanksgiving, my advice these days is simple: Forget pairing. Forget wondering what wine goes with turkey. (Seriously, turkey literally goes with every single wine on the planet.) Forget “My stuffing has rutabagas in it, so will a Vermentino from Italy work?” (Because, stuffing with rutabagas? What peculiar planet are you from?) No, there’s simply one thing to consider regarding wine and Thanksgiving, which is that you are going to eat way too much of everything and spend most of the rest of the day cheerfully bludgeoned into a food coma… my suggestion is to go light. Crisp, bright, moderate-in-alcohol wines that traipse with shimmering elfin transparency across your palate, not the ones that run your taste buds over like a fullback in the NFL game you’re probably going to fall asleep in front of. Think cool climate, think minimal oak, think modest alcohol, think vibrant flavors, and who knows? This turkey day, you may even make it to evening fully aware and, just possibly, hungry for leftovers, too.
This longtime Napa Valley producer was early to the game of making equally good Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc here. This estate bottling, full of melon flavors, avoids the green-pepperiness Sauvignon Blanc can sometimes have.
Winemaker Tasting Notes
This is a bright crisp sauvignon blanc with citrus zip, flavors of lemon, lime, yellow grapefruit, and lime zest combined with a fennel and caper vibrancy. Green and yellow hues present in this wine with exotic aromatics of pink grapefruit, green lime zest, lemon citrus along with undertones of fennel, and green olive.
October 10, 2023
