Thanksgiving dinner is a troublemaker! The meal is a mash-up of contrasting, often competing and sometimes outright conflicting flavors. It's just too much for any one wine to handle! And that's the good news. Thanksgiving gives us the perfect excuse to experiment with a variety of wines.
To welcome your guests, bubbles make the bash! On special occasions, nothing compares to a sparkling wine and nothing kicks off a party better. Try MountainRose Vineyard's, newly released Kelliokee!
Hang on to those bubbles for a bit. Sparkling wine is so much more than a toasting wine, it's a perfect partner for food. Its frisky acidity keeps the palate refreshed and on alert for whatever comes next. Bubbles are terrific partners with appetizers.
Of course, once you've popped the bubbles, you might find that Kelliokee, the sparkling wine, is versatile enough to carry you through the entire Thanksgiving meal, from the sweet-sour cranberry sauce to the pecan pie crowned with whipped cream. And the wine's relatively low alcohol won’t overwhelm you or the meal.
A dry Riesling's acidity and slight touch of sweetness are nice counterpoints to salty gravy-slathered turkey and mashed potatoes and a nice companion for sweet cranberry sauce. If you don’t have our Riesling in your cellar, it is currently sold out, the brisk acidity and citrus characteristics of Splashdam make a great choice, too. Our 2017 dry Riesling will be available after the holidays!
Depending on how it's prepared, pork tenderloin can go this way or that: it might want a dry Riesling if it's roasted with a spicy crust; or a fruity red wine, like Dorchester Red, if it's roasted with dried fruit, braised in a wine sauce, or stuffed with mushrooms or blue cheese!
For those of you who have roast beef or venison at Thanksgiving, give MountainRose’s Jawbone Red a try. Marinate venison in a red wine based marinade for 12-36 hours depending on size of meat and age of deer. Check out our venison tenderloin recipe!
Did you save room for pie? How about a wee glass of dessert wine on the side? With pumpkin or pecan pie, try a glass of Autumn Gold. Contrast the sweetness of apple pie with Splashdam and no one will find you napping!
Serving Tips for the Holidays: During the cooler holiday season, red wines should be fine served at room temperature. A good range to shoot for is between about 58 and 68 degrees. (Serve lighter reds a bit cooler than bigger reds like Cabernet Sauvignon.) However, if you keep your reds in the kitchen, and your kitchen is a kiln after many hours of dinner preparation, move them to a slightly cooler room, like the basement or an unheated utility room near the garage--or stick them in the fridge for 15 minutes before dinner. As for your whites, try taking them out of the refrigerator about 15 minutes before serving.
An inexpensive way to save leftover wine is to transfer the leftover wine into a smaller bottle. This helps because a smaller bottle will have less wine-trashing air. You can also purchase a vacuum pump that sucks the air out of the bottle to prevent spoilage. Or, perhaps best of all, you can gather the crowd around the table the next evening for a feast of leftovers and finish what you started!