Ina Garten's Top Wine Suggestions For A Flawless Thanksgiving

Celebrity chef Ina Garten sits on stage at an event.

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If you’re attending Thanksgiving as a guest this (or any) year, congratulations on skirting the hosting duties, and you should probably at least bring a bottle of wine. If you are, instead, turkey day’s master of ceremonies, congratulations on eschewing the demands of travel, and you should probably still stock plenty of wine, lest that other guy forgets. The celebrity chef and prolific cookbook author Ina Garten has already curated your perfect pours in either case.

“Since turkey day is, after all, an American holiday, I often opt for an American wine,” the culinary star beloved as the Barefoot Contessa writes in her Substack. That one bit of intel already narrows the focus to a single section of the wine shop, and she gets even more myopically granular from there. Simply navigate to a Sonoma Valley pinot noir, and you’ve landed on Garten’s specific pick. But she also, of course, has additional recommendations that expand once more for red devotees, as well as more internationally inclined drinkers, and anyone who still matches their wine color more precisely to their protein (which you really don’t need to do).

More of Ina Garten’s red, white, and sparkling selections for the food world’s biggest day

A Thanksgiving table features a turkey as people's hands are seen toasting with red wine above the bird.

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Plenty of holidays are synonymous with sundry foodstuffs, but Thanksgiving truly takes the cake, or, in this case, probably the pie. So it helps to have a similar variety of sips to pair with all of those sometimes disparate items. On the rouge end of the spectrum, Ina Garten also advises that you take a gander at your Morgon options, which will land on the lighter side of red’s expected heft.

Someone at the Thanksgiving table will fixate on white. The star of the dinner is most likely turkey, after all, which plenty of people can only imagine having with a blanc. White Burgundy wines like an oaky Meursault or a typically expensive, crisply fruit-forward Montrachet also make Garten’s list. Rattle off a few of these possibilities and a price range, and your friendly neighborhood wine merchant will likely link you with something terrific. And remember, this is all meant to be festive. You might even consider some bubbly for the occasion. “With dessert, pop the cork on a good Champagne like Perrier-Jouët or a less expensive Italian prosecco,” she writes. “Clinking of glasses is encouraged!”