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Wine with turkey: Tips to choose the best for you

Which wine with turkey? worry many home cooks. No wonder, as a good choice will perfectly round out and enhance your feast dinner.

More importanly, it will help you to make it a roaring success. After all, you probably spent a few hours in the kitchen and you deserve it.

My wine suggestions are from home cook to home cook. So, you won't find technical jargon here, but personal experience and Mediterranean diet tradition.

Wine and food

Generally speaking, white meat wants a light wine. Contrary to red meats, which go very well with full-bodied wines like the Catalan Priorat appelation.

Red wine or white wine?

For poultry recipes like the Thanksgiving and Christmas turkey, with a young light red wine you can't go wrong. A fruity red can harmonize very well with fowl. It balances the fat element, but you should make certain that it's dry. The Pinot Noir grape variety is a fine wine with turkey.

Further, light-bodied red wines of Cabernet Sauvignon are another good option for poultry.

Unless it's cava (more on the Catalan cava secret later), red wines are my preferred choice for the Thanksgiving and Christmas turkey.

However, if you really must have a white wine with turkey, I suggest a Chardonnay wine or dry German Riesling wine. The most important thing is that the white wine you choose is dry and has a vibrant personality, otherwise it will go unnoticed.

If you like to be special and try new wines, match your turkey with a white dry Marfil of the distinctive Alella appelation, located just a few miles (Km) from Barcelona. It's an elegant wine with a very long tradition in Catalonia, and it's now available in other countries too.

Pairing turkey with Catalan cava sparkling wine

Although not so widely known, Catalan cava is just as good as French champagne. Catalan sparkling wine has two advantages: It's more inexpensive and it's made from grapes that stored a lot more sun in the vineyard thanks to the sunny climate of the Penedes wine country, about 50 miles southwest of Barcelona.

In our Mediterranean diet tradition, we pair the Christmas turkey with Catalan cava. It's very festive and the perfect match for the elaborate poultry recipes of important holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas.

At Christmas, the moment the turkey is presented, while someone holds the big knife and fork to carve the turkey, someone else opens the first bottle of cava sparkling wine. It's a magic moment.