Monday, 25 December, 2017
Decanter
Unfortunately your favourite high street cave is suddenly rammed with customers who last encountered a Merchant on the credits of a film with Mr Ivory. It’s impossible to enjoy the most important bottle shopping trip of your year because the sales assistants are monopolised by all of these first-time buyers.
Presuming you come away with a few choice bottles, or have cherrypicked a selection from the cellar, now you have to deal with the Christmas dinner – which, of course, is an impossible meal for matching. Forget about pairing with the turkey; your carefully chosen wine will be trying to hold its own against a cranberry sauce that attacks your palate like jam, and a bread sauce that smothers every other flavour with the blandness of wallpaper paste. It’s all right for Cliff Richard – he just pairs his wine with mistletoe.
So pragmatists simply match the wine to the occasion, and go traditional: a nice old Burgundy or Bordeaux. After all, when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he didn’t envisage a Christmas Yet To Come involving wine from countries populated by either separatists or convicts.
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