What Wine Goes with Turkey: Match the Sauce

What wine goes with turkey is decided by everything on the plate except the turkey. The rule is blunt: "Sauces can be the dominant flavor instead of the meat or main component." Its worked example is poached fish, light bodied on its own and better served with a light white, but served under a heavy cream sauce it is better balanced by a fuller bodied white or a light red. A roast is the same problem with more moving parts. So find the loudest element on the table, match the body of the wine to that element, then decide whether you want the wine to echo the dish or cut against it. Those two moves settle the choice. The rest of this guide is refinement.

Why does the sauce decide the wine and not the turkey?

Because weight is the first thing to get right, and weight comes from the whole plate. The most basic element of pairing, is the balance between the weight of the food and the weight or body of the wine. Get it wrong in either direction and one partner buries the other. The entry's examples are a heavy Cabernet Sauvignon over a light, delicate quiche, and a light bodied Pinot Grigio under a hearty stew.

Weight is not only richness. It also covers the intensity of the flavours: delicate and subtle at one end, robust and hearty at the other. We recommend working out the dominant flavour from the cooking method, the sauce, the seasonings and the way ingredients blend into new flavours. It makes that point about Asian cooking, where the meat and the vegetables are rarely what stands out, and the same reading works on any dish assembled from many parts.

How heavy should the wine be?

Match it to the loudest element, then work from a list. The list includes wines in five rough weight bands.

Weight band	Examples
Lighter whites	Pinot gris, Pinot blanc, Riesling, Sauvignon blanc, Chablis, Champagne and sparkling wines, Gruner Veltliner, Vinho Verde, Muscadet
Medium to heavy whites	Oaked Sauvignon blanc, Alsatian wines, Albarino, White Bordeaux, White Burgundy, Rhone whites, New World Chardonnay
Lighter reds	Beaujolais, Dolcetto, some Pinot noir
Medium reds	Chianti, Barbera, Burgundy, Chinon, Rioja, Cabernet franc, Merlot, Malbec, Zinfandel, some Pinot noir
Heavier reds	Syrah, Brunello di Montalcino, Cabernet Sauvignon, Port, Barbaresco and Barolo

Treat the bands as a starting point, not a verdict. Alcohol is the primary factor dictating a wine's weight, so warmer regions push a wine up a band: A Sauvignon blanc from California can carry more weight than one from the Loire. Oak and house style move a bottle inside its band, which is why Pinot noir appears twice above and runs from light to medium bodied depending on who made it. If you want a finer scale than a band, borrow the professionals'. The Court of Master Sommeliers lists body in five steps on its deductive tasting format: Light, Medium Minus, Medium, Medium Plus, Full. Tannin gets two readings on the same sheet, a volume from Low to High and a texture from Silky through Gritty to Hard. That is a sharper instrument than "big red", and it is the vocabulary behind what wine body actually measures and how tannin reads on the palate.

Should the wine complement the dish or contrast with it?

Both work. Pick one on purpose. The entry sets out two strategies. Complement brings together things that share a character, such as an earthy Burgundian Pinot noir with an earthy mushroom dish. Contrast runs on the truism that opposites attract: a crisp, acidic Sauvignon blanc against fish in a creamy lemon sauce, where the acidity cuts the cream and gives the palate a different sensation from the one a buttery Chardonnay would bring. Complement was the prevailing thought for most of history. Contrast gained favour in the 1980s, on the same logic as salty peanut butter with sweet jelly.

Then decide who is doing the talking. Master Sommelier Evan Goldstein describes a pairing as two people in conversation: "One must listen while the other speaks or the result is a muddle". If the wine is the occasion, serve food slightly lighter in weight, light enough that it does not compete for attention but not so light that the wine flattens it. If the meal is the occasion, apply the same thought in reverse and let the bottle play support. Pinot noir appears in both the lighter and the medium band above, which makes it the useful test case for how Pinot noir pairs.

Which sides will fight the wine?

Sweet and spiced dishes are where tannin gets punished. Tannins react with proteins. Alongside food high in protein and fat, such as red meat and hard cheeses, they bind to it and come across as softer. Without that protein they bind to the proteins on your tongue instead, which accentuates the astringency and dries the palate. And the entry is explicit that spicy and sweet foods accentuate the dry bitterness of tannins and can make the wine seem to have off flavours. A tannic bottle next to a sweet glazed side is the one combination worth ruling out before you start.

Acidity is the tool for the rich end of the table. In dishes that are fatty, oily, rich or salty, acidity in wine can cut through the heaviness and act as a refreshing change of pace. A wine less tart than the dish it sits beside will taste thin and weak. A wine that reads as too tart on its own often softens against a tart dish, because the tartness on each side cancels out and lets the fruit and the other flavours show. That mechanism is worth understanding in full, so read what acidity does in wine before you dismiss a bottle for being sharp.

Sweetness has its own arithmetic: sweet wines often need to be sweeter than the dish they are served with. The entry's example is vintage brut Champagne against wedding cake, which leaves the wine tasting tart and weak. Sweetness also balances heat and contrasts with salt, which is the logic behind the European custom of pairing salty Stilton with a sweet Port. Alcohol cuts the other way: salt and spicy heat accentuate the alcohol and the perception of heat in the mouth, and the alcohol in turn magnifies the heat of a spicy dish.

Does "White wine with fish; Red wine with meat" settle it?

No, and the entry treats the adage as outdated. Its root is sound: match the body of the wine to the weight of the food, and meat was generally heavier while fish was generally lighter. Colour was a shortcut for weight. Modern winemaking broke the shortcut. There are now heavy whites, New World oaky Chardonnay among them, with more body than lighter reds such as Pinot noir or Italian Merlot. So the red or white question is the wrong one to argue about at the table. Weight decides, and white wine covers more ground than the adage allows.

Can one bottle cover a table of many dishes?

Only if you choose for versatility. The entry makes the point about an Asian meal, where several dishes are served at the same time and shared by everyone present: "The wine chosen for such a meal has to be versatile." A roast surrounded by sides is the same structure. Optimising hard for one element leaves you with a bottle that has to be protected from the rest of the plate: the tannic red the sweet sides will turn bitter, or the delicate white the heaviest dish will bury. Versatility is the property to optimise for, not peak performance against one course.

Sparkling wine is worth a thought here for the reason the entry gives for cheese: its acidity cuts richness while the yeasty autolytic aromas and medium body complement creaminess. That is the case set out for Champagne against creamy, bloomy rind cheeses, and the cutting mechanism is the same one that handles a rich plate.

What temperature should you pour it at?

Cold enough to keep the structure you spent all this effort matching. The guidance is precise about the trade: lower temperatures emphasise acidity and tannins while muting the aromatics, and higher temperatures minimise acidity and tannins while increasing the aromatics. A red served warm loses some of the grip that was meant to handle the fat. A white served too cold shuts down the aromas you chose it for. The Wine and Spirit Education Trust recommends.

Style	Serve at
Sparkling, such as Prosecco or Champagne	6 °C to 10 °C, well chilled
Light and medium bodied whites, such as Fino Sherry or Muscadet	7 °C to 10 °C, chilled
Medium and full bodied oaked whites, such as White Burgundy	10 °C to 13 °C, lightly chilled
Light bodied reds, such as Beaujolais, Valpolicella or Bardolino	13 °C, lightly chilled
Medium and full bodied reds, such as Rioja, Bordeaux or Burgundy	15 °C to 18 °C, room temperature

How do you make a good match tighter?

Use a bridge. The entry calls them "bridge ingredients": ingredients and flavours with an affinity for particular wines, slow cooked onions with creamy wines being its example. The trick also runs backwards. Take a herb or spice you can smell in the bottle, rosemary in some Cabernet Sauvignon on the entry's telling, and put it into the dish. Its presence in the food raises the odds that the wine will fit. On a roast, where the seasoning is yours to set, that is the cheapest adjustment available: you can change the dish to suit the bottle rather than hunting for a bottle to suit the dish.

Open the bottle when it is ready

None of this rescues a wine opened at the wrong moment. The pairing rules tell you what the food will do to the wine: protein and fat soften tannin, sweetness and spice sharpen it, acidity cuts fat. They say nothing about whether the wine has reached the point you bought it for. Track the drink windows on the wines you own, and pour the ones that are in their window this month rather than the ones that happen to sit at the front of the rack.

Start with the wines drinking well now, then match the plate to the bottle instead of the other way round.