Malcolm Jolley recommends a wine to begin the long weekend…
This is not a ‘turkey wine’ post. Lonf time GFR reader know I don’t do turkey wine posts, because there is no turkey wine. Or to be more specific, there’s not point trying to pair a wine with all the different foods you’d typically find on a Thanksgiving plate, so I say relax and drink whatever you like. Or, as my wife pointed out to me years ago, if you really wanted to pair a wine to a Thanksgiving ingredient, it ought to be the gravy, since it will be cured liberally on top of everything anyway.
Still, that’s not to say that fun cannot be had with wine this Thanksgiving weekend. Since the holiday is about celebrating the harvest, I try and have some local VQA wines around. After all, lean and Lighter Ontario reds, like Gamay, Pinot Noir or even cool climate Cabernet Franc will have lots of acid to cut through all that gravy. I also think that for Canadians especially, Thanksgiving is about saying farewell to summer before we face our long winter. If we’re lucky, it’s one of the last good weather weekends of the year. That’s why, after all, we moved our holiday from November to (we hope) sunnier October. In this spirit, I intend to sip on a crisp, fruit forward white wine, while my turkey roasts away. And this year that wine will be the 2019 Cave Spring Pinot Gris Niagara Peninsula VQA ($16.95 | LCBO# 522979).
The grapes that make this wine come from two spots: one on the Lincoln Lakeshore and another on the Beamsville Bench. Cave Spring follows the Ontario convention of calling those grapes ‘Pinot Gris’ rather than the perhaps more familiar Italian name, Pinot Grigio. Whatever it’s called, if I had to reference back to the Old World to describe the wine, I’d say it was more Grigio than Gris in so far that it’s bone dry (just a scant 2 grams of residual sugar per litre) and full of citrus fruit over a clean line of bright acid. I intend to pair it with some warm October sunshine on my face and a light snack, like trout paté, or whatever is handy. It occurs to me that this wine would also likely go very well with watching my kids rake and bag leaves.
Let’s talk turkey: at $17 the Cave Spring Pinot Gris is certainly worth a try.
