Wednesday Wine Tasting: Good Wines For Thanksgiving Turkey

The truth of the matter is, you can drink almost anything with turkey dinner -- most full-bodied, earthy, or well-balanced red wines, and many German, or Rhône-style whites will do the trick just fine. So many diverse flavors mean that many wines are bound to taste good with at least something you have on your plate.

But every year, food and wine magazines and the food sections of newspapers around the nation revisit this topic, and each year there seems to be a new trend or the beginning of a new consensus about What To Drink With Thanksgiving Dinner. Some (us included) stick to Zinfandel, because a good bottle has got all the hearty fruit and spice to stand up to the various earthy flavors of the holiday. This year in Bon Appétit, the recommendation is all Spanish -- Rioja reds and Albariño whites -- because these wines seem especially suited to cutting through the fat of the meal. Gourmet on the other hand (in their *sniff* final issue ever), highlights Alsace Gewürztraminers for a Pennsylvania Dutch-inspired menu, and Napa Valley Syrahs for a Southern-style menu.

Today, SFist brings you a mini-guide with a few suggestions from Peter Eastlake, proprietor of Vintage Berkeley:

For Thanksgiving, with that tsunami of flavors on the table, you want a user-friendly wine with minimal oak and a nice balance of fruit and acid to make the peace. We've got a couple wines in the store that stand out at me as really fun choices for the holiday -- and three of these come in unconventionally large sizes, perfect for big groups so you don't kill the bottle after pouring five glasses.

Morgan Peterson at Bedrock Wine Co. has a liter jug of a red blend called Sherman & Hooker's Shebang ($16). It's what the farmers used to call "mixed blacks," which is a blend of all the dark grapes on a vineyard including Zin, Carignane, and Syrah. It takes its inspiration from Preston's jug wine that they sell only on Sundays -- and Morgan's dad is Joel Peterson who started Ravenswood, so he knows a thing or two about blending grapes. The wine screams not to take it too seriously, and it's got great balance.