Pie and Wine

Filed in archive Food and Wine on November 27, 2006

The chow fest is finally over at my house! It was good, but I have to say I'm kind of glad it's over. It's amazing how much one can eat.

We had some great food though, and we also had some excellent wine. With our turkey dinner, we drank a bottle of Spätlese. We ate so much at dinner, that we waited a few hours before breaking out dessert, which was a yummy cherry pie, complete with vanilla ice cream on top.

After pie, it was time for more wine. While we didn't drink wine with the pie, we still notice a difference in flavor when we later opened a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. In fact, my husband was concerned that the wine had turned on us.

I, of course, had to give him a hard time because he's always buying wine and saying we'll drink it later. While I want to drink it now!

We had four bottles in our stash of this particular wine, so though I was teasing him, I was also concerned. Finally, we realized it was probably the pie that was making the wine taste weird. So we broke out some chips leftover from chips and dip earlier in the day, muched a few of those, and voila!

The wine tasted great!

I guess I should have found this article on pie and wine from SFGate.com before we freaked out:

But there are wonderful wine choices to consider with Thanksgiving dessert, be it pumpkin or pecan pie, kabocha squash bread pudding, fall fruit- based crisp or ice cream.

California white dessert wines have the fruit, sweetness level, intensity, mouthfeel, and in most cases acidity to complement the Thanksgiving dessert lineup. The best pairings occur when the sweetness and intensity of the wine is similar to or greater than the dessert's.

The Chronicle panel recommends a variety of white California dessert wines, from Viognier and Muscat Canelli with 5 percent residual sugar, to those with up to 20 percent residual sugar -- late-harvest Gewurztraminer, Semillon, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling and Moscato and proprietary blends. Generally, residual sugar determines how sweet a wine will taste, though a wine that has higher acidity may not taste as sweet.

Even though they're sweet, the recommended wines retain some characteristics of the varietals from which they're made, with aromas and flavors such as honeysuckle, peach, apricot, mandarin orange, apple, tropical fruit, honey and spice. Some have additional touches of petrol and mineral; most have a fruit-acid balance that minimizes any cloying effect, which can overwhelm some palates.