How to pick the right wine for Thanksgiving (w/video)

At the intimate Paradise Ridge tasting room in Kenwood, tasting room manager Annette McDonnell, a former chef, likes to guide visitors through a 75-minute sensory wine and food exercise with the goal of helping them relax about pairing.

Reservations are required to enjoy the Herb Garden and Wine Sensory Experience, preferably 24 hours in advance. It costs $40 for four wines with small bites. It’s well worth it.

Often held outside in the herb garden, which nearby Swede’s Feeds Nursery helped plant, McDonnell pulls from her surroundings to help people feel comfortable with balancing sweet and savory flavors from any dish with certain wines.

“Wine is emotional,” she said. “We’re anticipating that pleasure, tasting with our nose more than our palate. I encourage people to smell their way to perfection.”

There’s probably no more time that people stress out about pairing than Thanksgiving, when the range of guests and the range of dishes can make it difficult to pin down perfect pairs.

There are as many opinions as there are wines, with many folks opting for Beaujolais Nouveau, a wispy gamay traditionally released in November that serves as a lighter alternative to pinot noir. Others enjoy gewürztraminer or riesling with their meal. The wines are both aromatic and crisp in acidity and relatively low in alcohol.

Others like to have zinfandel on the table. It’s a wine, despite its recently discovered Croatian roots, still thought of as the one variety grown and made almost exclusively in America, and its fruit and spice are pleasing to many palates.

Of course, it can also be a good time to bring out older wines with some cellar age, both to mark the specialness of the occasion and, if all goes well, to appreciate such wines’ propensity for softened tannins, mellowed structure and savory aspects, coaxed over time.

McDonnell’s exercise can help further, in understanding how specific accents added to a dish can complement (or destroy) a specific wine.

Starting with a sauvignon blanc from the winery’s estate Grandview Vineyard in the Russian River Valley, as one example, McDonnell first asks participants in her sensory exercise to smell and taste the wine and then to categorize it one of several ways: bitter, a wine that’s high in acid; bright, a wine that’s high acid, low in sugar; savory, the wine offering moderate acid and moderate sugar; or sweet, featuring low acid and high sugar.

The sauvignon blanc falls within the bright rubric, creamy on the palate yet high in acidity and dry, as in not sweet.

On the tasting table, then, McDonnell pulls out combinations of herbs to make her point, categorizing them similarly. Bright herbs include lemon basil, verbena, dill and pineapple sage, for example.

Bitter herbs include arugula, Italian dark parsley and chives. Savory herbs are ones like purple basil, Berggarten sage, rosemary, thyme and Thai basil. Sweet herbs consist of fennel, Genovese basil, oregano, tarragon and stevia.

With the bright sauvignon blanc, she then demonstrates how the chemistry of an herb can potentially overpower the chemistry of a wine. Lemon verbena and sorrel, both considered bright herbs, make the equally bright wine too sweet, overpowering its acidity. The sweet stevia on the other hand, sucks out the wine’s fruit flavor, making it taste overly acidic.

Chives, on the other hand, bring the sauvignon blanc back into balance; it and its bitter counterparts match well with bright, acidic wines.

A bitter herb combined with a bright, like chives and lemon verbena together, or chives and Genovese basil, also bring the wine back into balance. That’s something to consider in terms of how to accentuate what is served at the Thanksgiving table, if a wine like sauvignon blanc is part of the plan.

McDonnell’s food example at the tasting room is a crostini drizzled in grapeseed oil and topped with two types of Cowgirl Creamery goat cheese, lemon basil and chive. It not only brings out the wine’s brightness, keeping it in balance, it coaxes earthy notes, too.

With zinfandel, Paradise Ridge’s powerful Rockpile Zin from the Branham Vineyard, McDonnell goes through the same exercise, zeroing in on the wine’s savory nature.

“It’s a beautiful turkey wine,” she added, “especially with Berggarten sage.”

A savory herb, this kind of sage is a flavor also found in wines that are aged in American oak barrels, she says. But it can be overpowering on its own, so McDonnell likes to combine it with lemon verbena, a bright herb, or opt entirely for pineapple sage, which is also bright. The zinfandel thus needs a combination of bitter and bright to really sing.

With a sweet wine, like the Paradise Ridge Ode to Joy, a late-harvest sauvignon blanc, McDonnell suggests using an herb like pineapple sage, presenting a crostini of goat cheese and Fuyu persimmon, drizzled in grapeseed oil, pineapple sage oil and honey. The honey is a key addition, helping the nibble better match the wine’s sweetness.

“With dessert, the pairing has to be sweeter than the wine,” she explained. “When I do these pairings, it’s always fun to see a skeptic have a hallelujah moment.”

Virginie Boone is a freelance wine writer based in Sonoma County. She can be reached at virginieboone@yahoo.com and followed on Twitter @vboone.