Don't Fowl Your Wine Pick

Filed in archive Food and Wine on December 22, 2006

If you celebrate Christmas, then you are already trying to figure out which pair of elastic-waist pants you can get away with wearing at your holiday feast. And, oh yes, what wine will you be drinking with dinner as well?

Many folks will be eating any of the following fowl - turkey, Cornish hens, goose. And, of course, there's a whole group of ham eaters right now, but let's stick to some wine suggestions to go with the bird.

Here are a few from The Gainesville Times:

Some folks have a traditional meal for this festive time of year, which makes the wine choice a simple one.

"We always have Cornish hens," Brian Pope told me recently. He's the owner of Discount Package Liquor, at 858 Dawsonville Highway, Gainesville, near the new Best Buy.

"And I'm a red wine man."

So Pope reaches for Dynamite Merlot or Frei Brothers Cabernet Sauvignon from Sonoma County in California to perch with his marinated, oven-roasted birds. "My daughter calls them mini-turkeys," Pope notes with a smile. His customers smile, too, after sampling the Frei Brothers cabernet, a full-bodied, dry red wine sensibly priced.

Cornish hens are poultry and thus can mate nicely with either red or white wines. I, too, am a red wine man, but I would lean toward a lighter red, such as a pinot noir, to accompany the Cornish hens -- or the traditional Christmas turkey.

Here are some wines that will mate nicely with poultry. Whites: Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc from the esteemed New Zealand wine-producing region of Marlborough, and Jean Baptiste Adam Pinot Blanc from the Alsace.

Reds: Kenwood Russian River Valley Pinot Noir, or Valley of the Moon Pinot Noir, both from Sonoma County.