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People often ask me what makes a good wine… good. The simple answer is: if you like it and you enjoy it, then it’s good. Ignore what the magazines and the ratings and the snooty people at the wine shop tell you. If you like it and you want more, then it’s good, and that’s that.

On a more general note, what makes a good wine is balance. There are different flavors in a wine, from the fruit flavors of the grape to tannins (sharper, more bitter) from the skins, acidity, and of course alcohol. These flavors need to be in balance to compliment each other.

A well balanced wine is like an experienced piano player striking three notes at once to play a perfect chord. There is a certain harmony in the taste.

A poorly balanced wine is like a cat leaping onto the keys. It’s just annoying and bothersome.

An excellent example of a well balanced wine is the new Riesling Kabinett from Donnhoff. This is an excellent white wine where the fruit flavors of green apple, pear, and apricot jump right out at you, but are balanced by a tinge of acidity and just enough sweetness to make the fruit seem right. At around $25 a bottle, this is still an excellent value.

Pair this with just about any food, excepting heavy, rich sauces and cream-based dishes, like anything with alfredo sauce.

Or, just chill this bottle down to about 50 degrees and drink it on it’s own. It certainly stands up to it, and you won’t be disappointed.

As promised, here are my favorite wines to pair with the traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

To begin, Thanksgiving is a REALLY hard meal to pair wines with. There is such a diverse offering of food, from turkey to cranberries, beans, squash, and pumpkin. Those are very different tastes that would ordinarily call for very different wines. To find a good wine for this meal you need to think broadly. For this reason I won’t name specific wines, but will instead focus on varietals and regions that will be good bets.

I will list three options in descending order.

3. Pinot Noir from Washington or Oregon

To me, northern California has lost the mantle of pinot noir capital of the new world. It’s moved north and Washington state is now producing the very best pinot in North America. This ancient and versitile grape is a good match with Thanksgiving dinner. It’s fruity with just enough acid to bring out the flavor of the foods without being overpowering. It lets you savor all the flavors of mom’s cooking without dampening the tastes like a merlot, or cabernet might.

2. Old vine zinfandel

Generally I avoid the zin’s. I have little respect for this grape and I think it’s far to overused and underutilized. In too many cases, Zin is the chardonnay of the red wine world. Most often sold by the tanker truckload and smelling of cat pee and cardboard. There are, of course exceptions. Look for the three R’s. Ridge, Ravenswood and Rosenblum. These are reliable producers who rarely miss a beat. Pick up one of these and your guests will thank you.

And the #1 pick for Thanksgiving dinner:

1. Riesling

That’s right. A white wine. Riesling is the Lon Chaney of the wine world. It’s the little black dress. The red tie. It goes with everything. A good riesling will appeal to your guests who love wine, and those who only have one taste each year.

Many wine drinkers prefer red wines, but will drink whites. Other wine drinkers only like whites. Very few will avoid white wines entirely. This makes riesling a wonderful choice for large gatherings like Thanksgiving. People new to wine will appreciate the slight sweetness and seasoned wine drinkers will notice your aplomb in pairing this excellent varietal with dinner. This is the wine that winemakers drink when no one is looking.

Best of all, riesling is generally inexpensive and easy to find. If you are only going to open one bottle, be sure to make it a riesling. Chose one from Germany, around $10 a bottle.

Also: consider champagne. No, I’m serious. As an opening to a rich, full dinner nothing beats bubbly. A relatively good champagne or sparkling wine served a couple hours before the meal is always in order. It’s the perfect appetizer while everyone is waiting. Sure, no one thinks of champagne and football, but more people should. Try it once, and you’ll be a believer too.

For the truly curious here is what I will be opening from my cellar this Thursday:

Besserat de Bellefon Cuvee des Mooines champagne

1996 Easton old vine Zinfandel, Shenandoah Valley, California

2003 Chateau St. Michelle Eroica Riesling

Most people know Vanessa Hoelsher as Playboy’s Miss September 2005. Now the wine world knows her as the importer behind “Bellisima,” a refreshing new red wine from Tuscany.

Vanessa grew up around the wine industry and after modeling for Playboy, she took the money and bought a winery in Italy. Bellisima, her first blend imported under the Villa Italia Wines label is a great offering. It’s made from the sangiovese grape and is from the local Maremma Toscana area, for the real sticklers.

The wine is brand new and might be hard to find at your local store if you don’t live in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut or Georgia. But if you like Italian wines and the sangiovese varietal in particular this is a wonderful first offering. My local wine store special ordered several cases just to have the wine “from the Playboy bunny.” Even so, it doesn’t disappoint.

More about Vanessa here.

 That’s right friends. This past week featured the third Thursday in November and that means that the new 2007 Beaujolais Nouveau wines have arrived in stores.

Beaujolais Nouveau is made from the very first pressing of the grapes. This wine was literally hanging on the vine a few weeks ago. It is picked, pressed, fermented and bottled for immediate drinking.

Nouveau is looked down on by some wine drinkers (ie: snobs) for it’s lack of age, depth and sophistication. I feel the exact opposite. I look forward to Nouveau season every year. It’s the first taste, the first hint we get of the year’s vintage. Nouveau is fun, fruity wine with no pretentiousness. Even the label is colorful:

So how is this year’s sneak peek at the vintage? Although I like Beaujolais Nouveau in general, this year seems a little flat. The wine tastes somehow watered down. Nice flavors of strawberry and banana come through and the finish is pleasantly dry, but I was expecting a little bit more than that.

But Nouveau is Nouveau. It is what it is. It’s fun and fruity and should never be drank after January. By then, it’s too late. You can get this at any local wine shop for about $10-$12 and I recommend you do so. It’s fall, so go out and taste the harvest.

And yes, this is of course an excellent wine to serve at Thanksgiving dinner. Stay tuned next week for more wines to pair with everyone’s favorite meal.

If you too are a wine fan, you could do a lot worse than to try out Juan Gil, a wonderful Spanish import from the country that is currently bringing us the best value in the world. It is made from 100% monastrell grapes and hails from the highly underrated Jumilla region. I get it locally for $15.99 a bottle, and it is surely worth much more. I highly recommend it.

Through the magic of the Internet I learned of two wineries I could visit during my vacation to Gatlinburg, TN last week.

The first (and far more widely promoted) was the aptly named “Smokey Mountain Winery.” I had high hopes for this place, what with their faux-German facade and bottles behind the tasting counter covered with 26 years of actual dust.

My optimism was misplaced. The wine served to us in tiny plastic cups was lackluster in the extreme. The staff at the tasting table was surly at best and well advertised tours were denied. Even the impressive dust covered bottles that any cellar-dweller would love turned out to be empty. The visit lasted about 10 minutes, total.

The next stop was the Mountain Valley Winery, my last hope for libation in the Smokies.

We parked in front of square grape vats - four foot cubes - with a man balanced on the edges holding a shovel. He was ramming the shovel into the vats with great aplomb.

“Pressing down the cap?” I shouted from the parking lot, and he looked up. Pressing down the cap is wine-speak for pushing the uncrushed grapes and skins back into the juice during fermentation, which is what this intrepid fellow was in fact doing.

We chatted for a bit, and discussed, shockingly, wine and wine making. As this rubber-booted, shovel carrying guy climbed down, he announced that he was actually the Master Winemaker, and we started to draw a crowd.

Our Master Winemaker - Doug - then gave a great lecture on winemaking, grapes, and his favorite wines to all assembled. I even got to taste next year’s merlot sampled out of the vat with the shovel. (A real treat for a wine-nerd like myself.) After he sent the other tourists into the tasting room, Doug motioned us into the bottling and storage room to show us his barrels and brag on some of his favorite wines. He cracked open a bottle of an upcoming vintage with a corkscrew produced seemingly by magic and handed us glasses.

Since it was Friday Doug then proclaimed the work day to be over and the wine day to begin. I could not have agreed more, even on vacation. He was the perfect winemaker: knowledgeable about the art and science of wine, enthusiastic about his products, witty and clever with the customers and generous with the pours. (”I vote Republican, but I’m very liberal with my wine!” Doug declared with a raised glass.)

And the wine? It was spectacular. Mountain Valley produces a truly exceptional shiraz that they boldly sell for $25 a bottle, and should honestly sell for considerably more. Their merlot and chardonnay are very good and as for that upcoming vintage… well, all I am allowed to say is that it’s a truly spectacular feat of winemaking. And I would say that even if Doug had not given us a bottle to take home.

I highly recommend any wine fans check out this winery on their next trip south. Pardon the commercial but it might be the highlight of your visit, as it was for me.

It’s a sad day when wine-makers go rogue.

That’s exactly what is happening in France’s southern Languedoc region. The CRAV, or Comité régional d’action viticole has bombed grocery stores, a winery, and two agricultural ministry offices among other targets.

Before you start thinking this is a Boston Tea Party style action for freedom and liberty, think again. These wine producers are finding it difficult to compete with lower priced imported wines from Spain and Italy, and want the French government to place high tariffs on these imports to make their own high-priced wines less sour to consumers.

The British wine magazine Decanter reported in May that:

The activist wine group CRAV has issued a one-month ultimatum to Nicolas Sarkozy threatening ‘action’, and possibly deaths, if the new premier does not help the struggling southern French wine industry.

In what may well be the precursor to the most violent period of its recent history, the Regional Committee for Viticultural Action (CRAV) told Sarkozy he had one month to honour his electoral promises of supporting the wine industry or ‘the whole industry will be targeted’.

On a pre-recorded cassette delivered to TV channel France 3 on Wednesday evening, five balaclava-clad men – ’somewhere in the Languedoc hinterland’, according to the report – read out a statement addressed to the new president.

They said that if in one month nothing has changed and that wine prices have not gone up, they will go into action.

‘If Sarkozy does not support the interests of the wine industry, he will be entirely responsible for what happens,’ said their spokesman. ‘We are at the point of no return.’

You can watch the video of winemakers gone mad at the BBC.