White Wine

This is a truly exceptional New Zealand pinot gris that ranks right up there with some of the best from France's Alsace region. It's a voluptuous dry white wine with a creamy texture and long finish. It offers a complex interplay of flavors of pears, peach, tropical fruit, spices and honey. This is truly a special-occasion white wine. Serve with baked salmon with a creamy sauce.

This Italian white wine in the unusually shaped bottle delivers a lot more flavor than your typical, watered-down pinot grigio. It's a full-bodied, ripe and smooth wine with hints of almonds, hazelnuts, lemons and apples. It has the kind of layered, creamy complexity you would expect in a more expensive white wine from Alsace or Burgundy, France. Serve with salmon.

1997 Georges Duboeuf Viognier, Vin de Pays de l'Ardeche ($8).Georges Duboeuf, the Beaujolais producer extraordinaire, continues his successful foray into the south of France with this delicious dry white wine. Viognier is the classic white-wine grape of the northern Rhone, and this wine does a convincing imitation of a $35 Condrieu at a bargain price. It displays the typical viognier flavors of peach, spices, melon, orange and nuts. Like all viogniers, it should be consumed young - preferably before the end of this year.

1997 Principessa Gavia Gavi, Villa Banfi ($12).Gavi, the leading white wine of Italy's Piedmont region, is usually a rather dull, neutral wine. This dry wine is a spectacular exception. It displays excellent freshness, body and flavors of pear, lemon, herbs, minerals and slate. Amazingly, it had the guts to stand up quite nicely to pasta in a tomato sauce. It's good to see a major Italian producer such as Banfi taking white wine seriously. Drink this fresh, lively wine over the next six months.

Like any rule, the mandate that red wine goes with red meat and white wine goes with fish has its exceptions.Sommelier Anne Bennett, fine wine director for Southern Wine & Spirits in Miami, says that while the formula remains valid in general, there are arguments for serving red wines with fish."

From: Vinos de Madrid, Spain Price: $12 Serve with: Grilled seafood, Asian cuisine Even after more than 25 years of reviewing wines, there are new discoveries to be made. Malvar is a little-known white wine grape indigenous to Spain. This example is quite distinctive, with a piercing but refreshing acidity balanced by generous flavors for orange, grapefruit, lime and spices. With no oak influence, it's a real wake-up call for a tired palate and an excellent value in a dry white.

2004 Veramonte Sauvignon Blanc, Casablanca Valley ($10). This highly regarded Chilean winery wasted no time getting this white wine to market - a move that pays off in freshness and liveliness. The wine offers vibrant pear, citrus, herb and mineral flavors that would be well-matched with spicy seafood dishes. There's no need to worry about cork taint because it comes with a screw top.

2007 Kim Crawford Unoaked Chardonnay From: Marlborough, New Zealand Price: $17 Serve with: Seafood, Asian cuisine Oak-free chardonnay is a white wine that is usually better in concept than execution because winemakers tend to reserve their best chardonnay grapes for fermentation in barrels. This fine producer apparently has gone oak-free with the good stuff. The wine is marvelously complex and fruity, with crisp flavors of pear, apple and citrus fruit, spices and butterscotch. Oak?