Picking The Right Holiday Wine

Picking The Right Holiday Wine

Picking The Right Holiday Wine. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report.

I always seem to have trouble picking the right wine to go with a meal and with the holidays coming up figured I'd better talk to an expert. Thomas Henick-Kling Director, Viticulture & Enology Program at Washington State University says you can't go wrong with sparkling wines.

HENICK-KLING: It would be good to not only try it for a toast but actually pair it with meals. There's different styles of sparkling wines around, a nice fruity style might something you have at the toast and then you something that's more yeasty, aged that goes with a nice meal.

One of his favorite combinations is sushi and sparkling wine. What about the old guidelines of red wine with beef.

HENICK-KLING: In general, that's still true but you can certainly cross over. Salmon is a good example. Salmon is a fish but it's a red fish and it depends on what spices are used, it goes really well with red wines. I like to put a dry rub of paprika and chili on my salmon and with that a grenache or pinot noir or syrah go very nicely

To top it all off there are some splendid dessert wines.

HENICK-KLING: The ones that stand out to me are those late harvest wines, resiling, semillon or sauvignon blanc. They tend to be very high in sugar from that shriveled berry they're made from but they usually balance nicely with acid too because of these varieties. As they get more and more ripe or more and more overripe they will still retain enough acid to balance the increased sweetness.

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.

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