What Wine Goes With Turkey?

Happened to see this article at the Batesville Herald Tribute which is written by Brenda L. Holmes. Found it very interesting, so I would like put it down here to share with my friends.

What wine goes with turkey?
By Brenda L. Holmes
Hendricks County Flyer (Avon, Ind.)

Winemaker Dr. Charles Thomas said the holidays are a perfect time to appreciate the attributes of wine with food.

“The best news of all is that almost any wine goes with turkey,” Thomas said.

Thomas is proprietor of Chateau Thomas Winery in Plainfield. The winery was founded in 1984 and moved to Plainfield in ‘97.

“When my family gets together for holiday dinner, we normally have anywhere from 20 to 25 people,” Thomas said. “With all those people we will usually have eight or nine bottles of wine open to go with all that turkey.”

Thomas said turkey comes with a multitude of flavors that can compliment several different wines.

“It doesn’t matter what kind of wine you like,” he said. “You will find one you like during a holiday meal.”

But he does have a few suggestions for varieties of wine that go especially well with holiday birds, depending on how they are prepared.

“You basically have three ways to prepare a turkey — you can roast it, smoke it, or deep fry it,” Thomas said.

He suggests white wines like Riesling, Chardonnay, or Sauvignon Blanc to go with a roasted bird.

“I would say even a nice Pinot Grigio would go nicely with a traditional style turkey,” he said.

Thomas said a smoked turkey offers herbal flavors to the pallet. Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Fraunc, and Sauvignon Blanc all offer a good flavor to the dinner, he said.

“A deep fried turkey offers a lot of buttery flavors,” Thomas said. “For that reason, I suggest Chardonnay or even give into the fruity reds.”

He said Zinfandel or a nice late harvest Port goes well with the deep fried variety of turkey.

Thomas cautioned serving any sweet wine during a meal.

“Sweet wines make you not want to eat,” he said. “And with all that food during the holidays, you want to eat.”

He said the sweet wines should be reserved for after the meal or during dessert.

“I’d save the sweet wines to go with pumpkin pie,” he said. “You want to start the meal with a dry wine. I know this can frighten people who have tasted the reds and found them bitter. Drinking the wine with food makes all the difference in the world.”

Thomas said what makes the wine bitter are called tannins.

“The tannins in the dry red wines go so well with food,” he said. “I promise.”

For those new to drinking wine, he said there is a festive French alternative called Beaujolais Nouveau.

“The grapes for this wine are harvested in September and bottled in November,” Thomas said. “People who do not have much experience with wine just love it because it tastes like bubble gum.”

He said the fruity fresh flavor will only stay around for the holidays and it should be thrown out after about six months.

“It’s good for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner,” he said. “But it is very tasty and not very expensive for those who don’t have much experience with wine.”

This type of wine becomes available Nov. 21, but Thomas said his winery does not carry it.

— Brenda L. Holmes writes for the Hendricks County Flyer in Avon, Ind.

Tips for Enjoying Wine While Dining Out

Ever feel like a daunting task when selecting and enjoying wine in a restaurant. Nope, it doesn't have to be.

Here are 10 tips for enjoying wine when dining out:

1. Don’t be afraid to ask the sommelier or server for advice. Let him know what kind of wine you and your dining companions prefer.

2. Look beyond the bottle. Many restaurants now offer other options for wine lovers such as wines served by the glass, wines served in half-bottles as well as wine flights (2-3 ounce pours of several wines, served at the same time). These are great when you are dining out and everyone wants to eat and drink something different.

3. Visit the Southern Hemisphere for white wines. New Zealand and South African Sauvignon Blancs are terrific food wines because of their herby, citrusy quality and great acidity. They work with so many foods for the same reason that squirting a lemon wedge on your dish does - it “wakes up” your taste buds, makes your mouth water and compels you to go back and take another bite of your food.

4. If everyone wishes to drink the same kind of wine, but each guest is ordering something different from the menu, then select a Pinot Noir from California, Oregon or Washington. Pinots are typically light to medium bodied, with light tannins. They can hold their own next to
any dish and they go exceptionally well with duck, salmon and chicken.

5. Seek out value areas on the wine list. Wines from South America, South Africa and the Languedoc region of France are delicious choices that won’t break the bank. You may end up finding a new favorite wine and impress your friends with your stellar wine knowledge!

6. Select Champagne or other sparkling wines. Usually relegated to Valentine’s Day, anniversaries or other celebrations, sparkling wines are often overlooked when dining out. But they are great wines to enjoy with food - the bubbles and acidity cleanse and refresh the palate.

7. Remember a few pairings. Pinot noir is just made for salmon. Chianti and Pinot Grigio go perfectly with anything tomato-based (i.e. a lot of Italian cuisine). Cotes du Rhone pair beautifully with lamb and stews. Off-dry Rieslings and Gewurztraminers work with Thai, Indian and Vietnamese foods.

8. Make sure the wines are served at the right temperature. Often, red wines in restaurants are served too warm. “Cellar temperature” for reds is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. If full-bodied reds like Shiraz or Zinfandel are served much higher than that, you may feel a hot alcohol sensation in the back of your throat. If this happens, ask the server for a bucket of ice water, and submerge the bottle for a few minutes. Likewise, whites served too cold, while refreshing on a hot day, will numb the fruit flavors. If a white is served ice cold, just use your hands to cup the glass for a few minutes to bring it up to a temperature where you will be able to enjoy its nuances.

9. If the wine smells or tastes musty or moldy, send it back! Let your server or sommelier know if you are one of the unlucky ones who gets a bottle or a glass of contaminated wine. They should have no problem replacing it.

10. Wine isn’t what you expected? If you and your companions just don’t like the wine, you can certainly send it back and get another bottle, but do not expect the restaurant to foot the bill. But don’t let it ruin your dining experience. Wine is very subjective, and figuring out what you like to drink is an ongoing process. Next time, test something else on the menu!

Is Smelling The Wine Cork A Myth?

Ha ha ha, what a interesting myth...

When a waiter presents you with your wine selection, it is often thought that it is a good time to smell the cork. Well, it is not wrong to do so as you can smell a few things on the cork such as a stale cork.

Hmmm, I would suggest that you feel the cork and notice if it is warm or cool, wet or dry, hard or soft. By feeling the cork can tell you whether the wine has been properly stored or at least hint a few clues to you.

The cork should be flexible, elastic, soft enough to be compressible and hard enough to hold together. Older wines will show some age on the cork. The “fill” line on the wine should be pretty close to the bottom of the cork. Hopefully the wine bottle has been kept in good storage to reduce evaporation.

If all these factors look good, just smell the wine and seek fresh aromas. If it is an older wine, the aromas may be more aged. However, we should never accept a wine that has any off aromas or stale characters. While some older wines may need a moment to wake up and really show their true selves, they should never smell dead, dried or stale. Stay alert for wet cardboard, wet
cork and musty-dusty aromas as this wine may be “corked”.

If this happens, the restaurant should replace the wine for a fresh bottle. You are encouraged to ask for a new one although this may not the fault of the restaurant, the winery or anyone specific. It may just be the cork and small little bacteria that made it through endless controls designed to eliminate bacteria which is a hard task.

New Found Website On Wine

Hey, you guess what?

I found a website that talks anything about wine and it has multi-language translation. In the website, there is a blog, videos on wines, wine news as well as articles for wine. One of the article that caught my attention is Preserving Wine With Gas. Besides wine articles, I find the newly created blog very cool and the posts are pretty interesting.

After browsing through my new found website, I have decided to add a link of its blog to mine so that I can always revisit the site in future.

Well, I am so happy with what I have found today. Cheers...

How To Store Leftover Wine

For some wine drinkers, very often they encounter situations whereby they could not finish the whole bottle of wine and needs to store it until the next consumption.

Well, do you know that the moment you pull the cork out of the bottle, wine comes in contact with air and once that happens, oxidation process begins. If you are not planning to consume all the wine in one sitting, then you need to know how to store the remaining wine so it won’t go bad.

Oxidation is the chemical reaction that occurs when oxygen comes in contact with wine. At first, oxidation is a good thing; it helps “open up” the wine, revealing different facets of its bouquet and aroma. However, after a couple of hours, further oxidation is a bad thing. It starts to damage the wine and will eventually ruin it.

Many of us have had the experience of leaving an unfinished bottle out all night without the cork back on. The difference in flavor and aroma the next day is striking and unmistakable. Even if re-corked the next day, the wine will usually taste flat and unpleasant. This is the product of the oxidation process.

So how do you preserve an open bottle of wine when you don’t want to (or can’t) drink the whole thing in one sitting?

There are in fact four reliable methods of preserving the remaining wine, some more reliable
than others:

(1) First, put the cork back on and put the wine in the fridge. The oxidative process slows down dramatically in cooler temperatures. This is a very easy and a fairly reliable method when you don’t have any other choices. Certainly much better than leaving an open bottle on the kitchen counter overnight.

(2) A second option is to transfer the remaining wine to a half-bottle (375ml) and put it in the fridge. Doing this eliminates most of the air that would normally come in contact with the wine in a standard-size bottle (750ml). While more effective than method #1, this involves carefully
transferring the wine over, which is only practical to do with a funnel.

(3) A third alternative is to pump out the air in the bottle with a “wine pump.” These pumps are fairly reliable and they work best if you also stick the bottle in the refrigerator after pumping out the air (no pump can completely remove the air from the bottle). Otherwise, you’ll still notice a slight difference in taste the next day and a more pronounced difference the following day and beyond.

(4) Use a wine preserver spray. This, by far, is the most effective and dependable method of keeping wine fresh. The spray is actually a blend of harmless inert gasses (gasses that don’t react with wine), which keep the wine from spoiling. Spraying the inside the bottle displaces the oxygen already present and leaves a blanket of inert gas over the wine. The amazing thing is, the gas will preserve the wine for days, even weeks!

What about wine that’s already spoiled? Whatever you do, don’t dump it down the drain. Instead, keep it in the fridge (with a cork on) for recipes that call for a little wine. Another idea is to pour it in ice trays and freeze it. And again, when you have a recipe that calls for wine, break off a few “wine cubes” instead.

Some may argue that it’s best to use fresh wine when cooking. However, do what you’d like. In some of the household, they do it so as not to waste a drop of wine!

Cheers...

Americans Prefer Cheap and Fun Wine

Few days ago, I came across an article from Chicago Tribune that talked about Americans' choice of wines. Pretty interesting.

Here it goes...

"Are American diners xenophobic and cheap? You've got to wonder, a little, looking at a recently released survey of the most-frequently ordered wines in U.S. restaurants in 2005.

The listing, issued by Restaurant Wine, a trade journal based in Napa, Calif., showed 52 of the top 60 wines ordered were American. Only two were French and six were Australian.

Four of those six Aussie wines are from the bargain Yellow Tail line and the other two on the list are pretty inexpensive too. (Not that the top 10 American wines were pricey either; think Kendall-Jackson vintner's reserve chardonnay, Beringer white zinfandel and Inglenook chablis.)

Yellow Tail's chardonnay ranked eighth, the shiraz ranked ninth, the merlot came in 20th and the cabernet placed 47th.

"It's astounding," said publisher Ronn Wiegand of Yellow Tail's rankings. His research was based on industry sources and from hundreds of interviews with restaurateurs, distributors, importers and wineries throughout the United States.

What it speaks to is the enormous popularity and brand recognition enjoyed in the U.S. by inexpensive Australian brands such as Yellow Tail.

Their success is easy to understand: The wines are fun, fruity, accessible and packaged with brio. And they're catching on.

Just ask Larry Kaplan of The Wine Cellar in Palatine, Ill. He usually doesn't sell wines available at supermarkets because supermarkets can buy more and sell it for less.

A customer came in and rattled off a "laundry list" of five inexpensive wines of which Kaplan had none.

"He said, 'You must carry Yellow Tail,' and I said, 'No sir, I don't.' And he said, 'You don't carry any good wine,'" Kaplan said with a chuckle.

Goodness is subjective, but there's no quarreling with the fact that cheap Aussie wines are generating lots and lots of money for Australian winemakers, who seem to have an inexhaustible supply of fun, boldly packaged wines to flood our shores.

The Aussies have "sort of stampeded the market" with bargain wines, Wiegand said. This has occurred even at the expense of pricier, higher-quality wines from Down Under.

What Wiegand expects, and Australian winemakers certainly hope, is that inexpensive wines such as Yellow Tail will be viewed as "starter" wines, meaning these brands will encourage American drinkers to eventually move up the ladder in terms of quality and price."

That's an interesting article to read, isn't it. Cheers...

How Long Can Wine Last

Two common questions that wine lovers always wanted to know are regarding to what happens after the wine bottles have been opened.

After some researching, this is what I got.

Q1: Once I have opened the wine; how long will it last?
A1: Wine is alive, like a flower. When you purchased the flower, it was a bud. A day later, the flower opens. Two days later, the flower is losing its structure and its beauty. The same applies to wine. It is hard to hold a wine together for more than a few days. By the second day after it has been opened, most wines I have tasted have shown evidence of deterioration. Some wines hold together pretty well until day three, but only occasionally.

Q2: Once a bottle is open, is there anything I can do to help my wines age well?
A2: First of all, eliminate the oxygen as much as possible. The best way to do that is to transfer any "leftovers" to a smaller container that doesn’t leave a gap in between the wine and the lid. If this is not possible, there are a few quick things you can do to the bottle you have opened.

1. Use a nitrogen gas that is heavier than oxygen to push the air out the top of the bottle.
2. Pump the air out of the bottle.
3. Fill the bottle with "wine beads" to fill the depleted void remaining after the wine has been drank. "Wine beads" will not rust or mildew or influence the flavor at all.
4. Drink the wine quickly.
5. Cook with the wine that goes bad. You have many weeks to do this.

Well, although we can follow the above instructions once the wines are open, nevertheless, isn't it nice if a few good friends can sit around; eat, talk and fully enjoy the wines without having to keep it for another day.