How to Pick Wine for Thanksgiving

Do you need a great Thanksgiving wine? There are lots of options you can use to match Thanksgiving wines to your menu and tastes. Thanksgiving is a complicated meal, and picking a wine can be intimidating. Read this to learn how to pick wine for Thanksgiving.

• Red with red meat, white with white meat — but what goes with the Thanksgiving meal? You need to pick a wine that will stand up to the various flavors, and provide a variety that will please every diner at the table. Sound intimidating? With the instructions below, it doesn't have to be!

• It's easy to spend exorbitant amounts of money trying to buy the perfect wine. However, there are many inexpensive wines that are very enjoyable.

1. Decide how much money you can spend.
2. Estimate how many bottles you will need. A good rule of thumb is that you will need two bottles for every five people at your event.
3. Divide the money you have by the number of bottles you're buying. Now you have a general idea of how much to spend per bottle.

• The traditional rule of thumb is to pair white wine with poultry, but that rule can be broken on Thanksgiving. While white wine is usually great, its mild flavors can vanish when paired with heavy Thanksgiving food. However, some people just won't drink red wine, so providing a white alternative is good.

1. There are so many flavors on the table that it's nearly impossible to pick a wine that pairs perfectly with everything. The good news? Almost any wine you pick will go well with something on the table, so you have some safety.
2. Avoid oakey wines. Fruity wines generally pair better with turkey.
3. A great red for Thanksgiving is zinfandel. Not the pink, sugary-sweet stuff; that's white zinfandel. Red zinfandel is less sweet, but full of fruit.
4. Another great, fruity red is Pinot Noir.
5. Beaujolais Nouveau (not to be confused with plain Beaujolais) is a red wine that only comes out once a year, and is meant to be served young, not aged. It's very fruity, often inexpensive - and, conveniently, is released just a few days before Thanksgiving.
6. If you want to straddle the line between red and white, rosés are recommended by many people.
7. Whites are often overwhelmed by the meal, and it's rare that any two wine writers agree on what white works. Rieslings are most consistently recommended for a Thanksgiving meal — although recommenders are evenly split between "but never European Rieslings!" and "but only European Rieslings!"
8. Other popular whites are Sauvignon Blanc, Gewurtztraminer and Chardonnay, although for each, you'll find a wine writer who thinks it is exactly the wrong wine. Their opinion doesn't matter. Do you like the wine? Then it's the right one.

• Just because you're done with dinner doesn't mean you're done with wine. Dessert demands completely different wines. Normal wines will clash with the flavors of dessert; for a sweet dish, you need a sweet wine.

1. "Late harvest" wines are high in sugar, and perfect with pies.
2. Sherry goes well with pumpkin pie.
3. Ice wines, usually from Canada, are made from grapes that have frozen, and are thus sweeter. They match well with most desserts.