For reasons I’ve never entirely got to the bottom of, a lot of wine lovers (including many wine writers) don’t really go in for thinking too hard about matching food and wine. Well, maybe I do understand a little: some exponents of what should be a fun and life-affirming extension of preparing a meal can be off-puttingly solemn, pedantic and rule-bound, offering up their advice in a fussy spirit of fear and implying that a bad match will not just spoil your dinner but mark you out as irredeemably philistine.
When you read the best writers (Fiona Beckett, Victoria Moore, Joanna Simon) working at the intensely pleasurable point where wine meets food, or if you’re lucky enough to go to a restaurant with a properly switched-on sommelier, you soon understand that the act of choosing a wine to go with a dish is no more, nor less, complicated than selecting the ingredients for the dish itself. A good choice really will lift both dish and wine and, if you’ve taken care with getting the food right, why not try to find something that will show it in its best light?
That’s how I think about wine pairing most of the time: there’s no shame in smothering a delicate Dover sole in sriracha or eating it with port, if that’s what you fancy doing, but I’m pretty sure you’d have more fun if you had it with lemon and a glass of cool, crisp chablis. But if there is one meal where I do find myself sympathising with something like an anything-goes attitude, it’s Christmas dinner – a meal so full of contrasting, clashing textures and flavours it doesn’t really pay to try and pin down anything too specific, since an absolutely sublime match for sausage-meat stuffing may well not be the thing for sprouts and chestnuts.
If there is a rule I tend to follow when picking out wines for the roast bird and trimmings, it’s that the wine must have two properties: it must be sufficiently ample in texture and flavour, while also having enough acidity to cut through the sheer onslaught of fat and richness that the meal as a whole offers. That’s why Bordeaux wines, red and white, which at their best combine depth and weight with an appetising Atlantic-borne freshness, are often my first port of call for Christmas. Two to consider this year are the bright cassis, cherry and graphite Croix des Coteaux St-Emilion 2022 red (£16 down to a very attractive £10 as part of Waitrose’s Fine Wine at £10 offer) and the honeyed, flinty, grapefruit-racy oaked white C de Sec du Château Closiot, Barsac 2023 (£14.95, The Wine Society).
There’s something of the same appeal in wines made from Bordeaux grape varieties elsewhere in the world: reds such as the exuberant Xanadu Point Break Cabernet Sauvignon 2023 (£13, Tesco) from Margaret River in Western Australia and the deep but refined Michelini i Mufatto GY Malbec-Cabernet Franc 2022 from Argentina’s Uco Valley (£23.95, Corney & Barrow); or an oily oaked sauvignon-semillon white from South Africa, such as the magnificent Vergelegen GVB White 2022 (£35.90, Noble Green Wines).
Other rich-but-balanced white possibilities include classic oaked chardonnay from Burgundy (the poised Domaine Guerrin & Fils Pouilly-Fuissé Cuvée Vieilles Vignes 2023; £27.50, Tanners) and Chile (Errazuriz Gran Reserva Chardonnay, Aconcagua Chile 2024; £11.50, Tesco). While, for a selection of reds defined by their festive dinner-ready combination of heft and acid-lift I’d turn to Italy, Greece and Georgia, in the shape of the chewy but charmingly fragrant Produttori del Barbaresco Langhe Nebbiolo 2023 (£26.90, Noble Green Wines); the wild herbs and cherries of Thymiopoulos Xinomavro 2022 (£16.50, or £14.50 as part of a mixed case of six, Majestic); and the brooding blackberry of Morrisons The Best Block Series 008 Georgian Saperavi 2020 (£12, Morrisons).