Giving Thanks for Virginia Wine

I love Thanksgiving.  It’s a holiday that doesn’t revolve around spending far too much money for stuff people don’t really need (and often don’t even want).  Instead, it’s about family, friends, and food.  Both Grape Envy Guy and I love to cook…and we’re both pretty good at it even if I do say so myself.  Most days what we cook is pretty basic and unimpressive (albeit tasty) since we’re both very busy with our day jobs.  Given this, Thanksgiving is a time for us to pull out some more involved, and often less healthy, recipes.  It also let’s us have fun with wine (from Virginia of course), since that’s definitely one of the things we’ve got to be thankful for.

We serve our Thanksgiving dinner in the late afternoon, so our first wine choice needed to be fun and festive so it could be sipped as we chatted and snacked on assorted bites.  We opted for the Albemarle Cider Works Ragged Mountain Cider.  As we described after our visit there this summer, this was a light all-purpose cider that will appeal to most.  I enjoyed the light yeast notes paired with green apple and citrus.  All things considered, it was a good way to start the eating and drinking.

With our meal, we wanted to go with a white wine, but we were definitely not looking for anything ordinary.  In the end, we settled on the Traminette from Castle Gruen.  Since we first tried it, the spice elements have become more pronounced although there are still a lot of interesting floral elements in the mix as well.  The fruit flavors I was getting before have now taken a back seat, however.  It has more viscosity than I normally expect from a non-dessert wine, and  that added a fun element to the dinner.  It also stood up really well to the wide array of flavors on our table.

For those of you into food, we’re big Alton Brown/Good Eats fans, and a number of his recipes made it onto our table (i.e., brined turkey, corn bread pudding, cranberry dipping sauce).  We also had to have cranberry sauce from the can and my sauteed green beans with peppers and parmesan.  This year we also tried to make our lives a bit simpler by using some crock pots to roast root veggies and cook dijon glazed carrots.  (I’m getting hungry again just writing this.)

After we’d all had some time to recover, we moved on to dessert.  I love to make delicious but horrible for you desserts, and holidays are some of the only times I let myself do this.  This year, I made 2 different types of pies: a super smooth pumpkin pie and a cranberry apple pie.  Both recipes come from Cook’s Illustrated, and neither was a disappointment.  The cranberry apple pie was a new one for me, but I think it may become a perennial favorite.  We served this with the Adieu dessert wine from Gray Ghost Vineyards.  They actually recommended pairing this wine with pumpkin pie while we were there, and I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.  It played well with the spices in the pumpkin pie, but it did nothing at all for the cranberry apple pie.

All in all, it was a great day-long meal with lots of great times and great wine.  In the end, it doesn’t really matter exactly what you drink with what as long as you’re enjoying yourself.  I know I did, so I’m going to put all of this firmly in the win column.

The Giving Thanks for Virginia Wine by Swirl, Sip, Snark, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.