Best Wines For Pumpkin Pie
You could end Thanksgiving with pumpkin pie and coffee. You could also drive 30 miles per hour in a 50 stretch, listen to music with cheap earphones, and go to bed early Saturday night. But, hello, it's Thanksgiving. This is no time for underachievement.
So, we have two wine ideas that will take that pumpkin pie to a whole new level. In fact, we've watched it happen many times this year: the right wine can elevate the flavor of a dish. 1 + 1 = 3, so to speak. Our kind of math.
The first is the famous light, honied Hungarian dessert wine Tokaji Aszú. Tokaji (pronounced toe-KIGH) was once the most famous dessert wine in the world, until decades of Communism put Hungary behind an Iron Curtain. Today, Tokaji is back, and it's pure magic with the dried fruit, rich pumpkin, and nutmeg flavors in pumpkin pie. The Royal Tokaji Company makes several of our favorite ones.
With Thanksgiving's top pie, we also love PX — a must-try for any wine lover. To make PX, pedro ximenez grapes are picked and laid out on mats in the scorchingly hot, bright sun of southern Spain. The grapes shrivel and turn brown like raisins, concentrating the sugar inside. The wine that results is mahogany-colored, syrupy in texture, and oozing with decadently rich flavors reminiscent of molasses, dried apricots, and black figs. Amazingly, given such atomic density of concentration, the wine is also ethereally elegant. Toro Albalá; is our favorite producer.
There you have them — two wines to end Thanksgiving with a bang, not a whisper.