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By CHRIS SHERMAN © St. Petersburg Times, published November 19, 2000 Oh, no. It's Thanksgiving, that lovely feast now the most dreaded of holidays. Turkey to stuff and roast, sweet potatoes, cranberries, Uncle Harry's creamed onions, fresh biscuits . . . is it too late to get takeout? And the wine, do you have to have white wine with turkey? What if the turkey is smoked and the dressing has oysters, should we serve chardonnay? And which one doesn't have too much oak? Is the '97 cabernet ready? Or would it be too much with cranberry sauce with horseradish in it? Calm down, folks. If I can't convince you that turkey, dressing and sweet potatoes practically cook themselves, let me lighten the load on the wine question: Anything goes. Or darn close to it. Really. First, you deserve a holiday from sweating over supposedly perfect matches of food and wine. There are good reasons why a wide variety of wines are welcome at the Thanksgiving table. First, that table is full of so many competing flavors, sweet, spicy, smoky, fatty, salty -- and that may be just in the bird -- that few wines can match them all. Nor should they. This is a meal where food and cooking, as old-fashioned as that may seem, are the stars. Even a brilliantly selected wine choice plays second. If you focus on the centerpiece turkey, its moist white flesh and rich dark meat reminiscent of game, its skin redolent of hearth or smoker, you can drift back and forth across the dividing line between whites and reds. Indeed, a good dry rose can be fine. Any number of wines are fine, from a hearty American zinfandel, to a peppery Rhone, a simple merlot, a pinot grigio or your favorite chard. For proof, consider two recommendations, a gewurztraminer for the white and a Beaujolais if you want a red. The gewurz with its perfume of spice and flowers and the Beaujolais with its fresh bright cherry flavors are very different wines, but they're also similar. Both are easy-going wines that can be found for $10 or less. The Beaujolais can even be served with a chill on it, as is a gewurztraminer. And they fit the most difficult match at the table, a spectrum of palates that can range from favorite aunts to wine fans. Plus both wines are good matches with turkey and the holiday. Beaujolais is France's best all-purpose red wine and seems made for Thanksgiving in timing and symbolism. The just-arrived nouveau is released the week before our holiday every year and is often the first wine of the vintage (although the Italian novellos can beat it and did this year), and it is celebrated as a sign of the harvest. Indeed Beaujolais nouveau is inescapable in United States groceries at Thanksgiving, and it does make a good turkey wine. Although it can vary widely, the nouveau is a light red wine, bright and fruity in a crowd-pleasing way, sweet enough to go with the warm flavors of the dinner and still crisp to offset the heaviness. If your meal has some spiciness, the Beaujolais might have some pepper too. Should this year's nouveaux be too light or too sharp, well, Beaujolais is made from gamay grapes, and no one expected a killer cab. Better however to recognize that nouveau is the least of Beaujolais, very young stuff that will get better. Because much of the cost of the nouveau comes from rushing it by air freight, ordinary older Beaujolais won't cost much more (sometimes less). You'll still be in the $8 to $15 bracket. The Beaujolais region, remember, is the countryside that adjoins Lyons, the seat of chef Paul Bocuse, and one of France's lustiest food cities. The good people of Beaujolais themselves like hearty foods, from boeuf bourguignon to game and pork. They don't seek out weak, wimpy wines. For better quality reds, softer and richer, look back to 1999 or earlier for bottles marked Beaujolais-Villages, made from the vineyards of a select group of small villages. Still better, seek out the best villages, Moulin-A-Vent, Morgon, Chenas and Brouilly, all of which produce wine that is especially concentrated, ripe and plummy, gamay that is closer to pinot noir and Beaujolais as the poor man's Burgundy. These are good for five years back, and the best can last longer. A few Beaujolais are sold in the U.S. under the name of the vineyard owner, like the Morgon of Jean Descombes, whose wine is in the stable of Georges Duboeuf. Most, however, are sold by negociants, companies that buy and blend the wines of many growers, and Duboeuf is not the only one. Drouhin, Mommessin and Henri Fessy import a wide range of Beaujolais. Among white wines, gewurztraminer is especially appropriate for the food of Thanksgiving and a sentimental favorite. Despite its northern European heritage, gewurz (the spicy strain of the traminer grape) symbolizes the cornucopia of California's and ultimately America's vineyards. For now, gewurztraminer is in short supply. But at one time it was valued as a grape that made distinctive and lovely wine and grew well in cool conditions -- and as we bore of chardonnay and expand our grape plantings, its time may come again. The reasons for its disfavor (and low profit) for American wineries are fears over pronunciation (guh-VURTZ-truh-mee-nur) and the sophisticated protest "I don't like sweet wine." Both are remarkably irrelevant when vintners pour the wine unannounced in tasting rooms, which gives heart to gewurz fans and creative winemakers In the glass, gewurz, like riesling, the other great varietal of Germany, is a delight for most people. It has all the friendly spices of a Thanksgiving kitchen and enough flowers to teach anyone that wine has distinct aromas, in this case a genuine bouquet. The taste is of some of our favorite white fruits, such as peaches and nectarines, with a bit of honey, yet they are distilled in cool essences, not cloying syrup. In the best examples, they are perfectly balanced with a crisp acid background that clears the palate and stands up to spicy foods.
While rieslings are a popular Thanksgiving choice, the happy spices of gewurz seem even better. Thankfully, gewurz hasn't entirely disappeared. A number of American wineries, especially north of Napa and in the Northwest, make gewurztraminer for $7 to $12, plus a few higher grade reserves (and, of course, dessert wines). Fetzer, for instance, is still a believer, making 40,000 cases of gewurz a year; Navarro, Kenwood, Chateau St. Jean and Hogue Cellars all keep the varietal alive with good wines. You'll also find it made in New York, Michigan and Canada. If home-grown gewurz isn't sufficiently sophisticated for you, seek out pricier wine from French Alsace or Germany itself. Alsatian gewurz preserves the aroma but delivers a decidedly drier and crisper taste, but is likely to cost $15 or more. Germany makes more riesling than gewurz, but there's plenty available, in kabinett grade or trocken versions. You can also try sweeter or riper, late harvest versions from any country; they'll work surprisingly well but may be more than you need. Consider the case of Charlie Trevino, who runs tastings at Hogue, in Prosser, Wa., and gives considerable thought to wine and food. "You have to picture Thanksgiving at our place. We have so many people we have to stagger them. Last year we had about 30, and that's because not everybody could come." He poured Hogue's basic gewurz and the winery's higher-end dry reserve gewurz. "It just matches all those flavors, the oven-roasted skin, the sage in the dressing, all that stuff." He poured a syrah for a red. "The one they liked best was the ordinary gewurz. They came back for it. They said they felt they could get up from the table and still enjoy it."
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