What to drink with your turkey, dressing and pie?

Knowing some people worry about which wine should be served at Thanksgiving makes me sad. There really isn’t any “should” when it comes to wine, except that people should drink what they like.

Yet Thanksgiving is our culinary holiday; there really is no other where it is presumed that people stand over the stove for hours. And it is the one holiday when diners pay attention: flavors are savored, aromas discussed. Wine deserves some space at the table, too.

America’s culinary contributions evolve from disparate cultures and time periods, and we ought to champion our country’s remarkable diversity. If we’re willing to give our cuisines the mashup, we should show equal irreverence for beverage pairings.

It’s always nice to start any meal with a glass of bubbly (I recommend Gloria Ferrer Blanc de Noirs, if only as a great value) but why not beer? The Pilgrims didn’t have wine, but they had beer (the captain of the Mayflower wrote that they landed at Plymouth Rock “our victuals being spent, especially our beer”). One presumes they made more.

It’s ideal to have a crisp brew to whet the appetite, and I’d recommend something tart and light, like Crane Brewing’s refreshing Tea Weiss beer. If you’re sold on wine, Prosecco is good, probably better than a glass of Perrier for washing down dinner.

For a different tipple, try sherry. When dry, it is often served cold, young and fresh; Manzanilla is the lightest of them (the best include Barbadillo, Gonzales Byass, Hidalgo, La Guita and Lustau) and if you’re fortunate enough to see Manzanilla en Rama (a filtered version), buy that, too. It tastes like something you’d pour on an oyster but only in the best possible way: tart, lemony and salty. It assaults the palate and then evaporates like summer rain.

If you’re having Roasted Cauliflower With Tahini, Olives and Lemon, the dryness of the Manzanilla is mitigated, tamed even. Here again, I wouldn’t mind a beer, a lighter Pils, something like KC Bier Co.’s pleasing Helles.

Whether we’re talking about potatoes au gratin or Carrots au Gratin, it’s all about the cheese, people. Yes, I know you’ve been told that cheese and wine are a thing. But the truth is, cheese and WHITE wine are a thing. Grab a bottle of Austria’s Grüner Veltliner (say, Nigl, or Hiedler, or one of my obsessions, Bründlmayer); the gratin could end up tasting even richer. Fret not, you can use any white wine you please.

Classic dressing is a cacophony of spices, as if to show off our wealth of choices among what were, a few centuries ago, the greatest luxury humans had to dress their food. Traditional Dressing offers nutmeg, garlic, sage, parsley, thyme and cloves. I could recommend a wine for it, but dressing is for the turkey — and the wine is, too.

Turkey is a meat with more juice than richness, though the two are supposed to coincide. They don’t always. . With the Guajillo-Rubbed Turkey, however, you’ve got the smoky, earthy, slightly prickly flavors of peppers and a zesty au jus.

I’m nuts for spicy food and slightly sweet Riesling. So I’ll probably have a bottle of Gunderloch in honor of the recently departed, truly great winemaker Fritz Hasselbach. Gunderloch’s wines are always stunning, but I’ll probably have some Dönnhoff, Leitz, Monchhof, J.J. Prüm, Weins-Prüm or Zilliken on hand, too.

If my sister-in-law drops by we’ll need more beer. Perhaps she would prefer Torn Label’s balanced red rye ale called KC P’rye’d. Beer like this is an almost ideal companion to the diverse flavors of Thanksgiving: the malty weight of an Ommegang (from Cooperstown) or Boulevard Snow & Co. Tell (from a baseball town much nearer) links arms with the inherent sweetness of these foods.

But there’s a wine I once routinely recommended on this holiday: Beaujolais. After a few years, I started to feel unimaginative rolling out my old canard. I stopped mentioning it. And in the meanwhile the best producers of Beaujolais started making better wine. And then others around them did too. And now this may be the most exciting place in France. There’s always Duboeuf or Jadot; they’re quite reliable, of course, but check out Burgaud, Diochon, Dupeuble, Lapierre, Liger-Belair, Lavernette, Thevenet or Thivin too.

Finally, there’s pie. In this case, it’s Browned Butter Caramel Sweet Potato Pie With Spiced Praline Crumble, which conjures up everything delicious about Thanksgiving. It’s really sweet and, while I hate rules, the wine should be sweeter than the dessert.

Stone Hill has been making a crazy rich “Missouri Cream Sherry” for years; they haven’t let me down yet. Apply it to this pie and you’ll be glad you live in this part of the country.

This story was originally published November 15, 2016 at 8:00 AM with the headline "What to drink with your turkey, dressing and pie?."