Wines to savour with your Easter feast

Easter may well be my favourite time of the year. It’s certainly started to appeal to me more than Christmas. You get all the same opportunities for eating, entertaining and extended vintage film-watching. (Who doesn’t love a three-hour sword and sandals epic after Easter Sunday lunch?) But unlike the ever more aggressively marketed December shenanigans, there’s not quite the same feeling of enforced excess. Spending is a little more circumscribed (there are only so many chocolate eggs you can buy or eat) and all being well, you can spend quite a lot of the holiday outside, and well into the evening too.

The feasting part is also so much more relaxed, less prescribed. It’ll probably be fish on Good Friday in my house, and it’ll probably be a roast (and probably lamb) on Sunday. But no one’s insisting on having the exact same trimmings, or that everything’s cooked in the exact same way that it is every year. There are no real family traditions to break with.

That makes picking wines an equally leisurely and open-ended pursuit. If I’m having people round, I like to have a sparkling wine on the go, and the one I’d be keen to get my hands on this year is a genuinely outstanding bargain that should be arriving in Lidl stores as part of the discounter’s April Wine Tour later this week. Château Dereszla Tokaji Brut is a proper traditional-method (ie made like champagne and English sparkling wine) fizz from a Hungarian region, Tokaji, that is best known for its barley-sugar sweet and tangy dessert wines. It’s wonderfully refined with tingling, steely acids and just enough of that bready-biscuity-yeasty quality you get in serious fizz. And it’s £7.99.

I also like to keep plenty of options for sipping with the one non-negotiable of Easter feasting: chocolate. My favourite partners for dark, high-cocoa content chocolate tend to share that same bittersweet (accent on bitter) flavour and dry, dusky feel. That might be a powerful, just-a-touch-sweet Italian red made from dried grapes, such as Tesco Finest Amarone della Valpolicella 2021(£21; 15.5%); a dark, black cherry-juicy, inky-purple, happily foaming and spicy Australian sparkling red, such as the 5OS Project Sparkling Shiraz NV from McLaren Vale in South Australia (£19.95, Virgin Wines); or a vibrant, vividly dark berry-filled, sweetly inviting youngish red fortified such as the lush, cherry-skin sheer, Domaine Lafage Maury Grenat 2024, Maury, France (£16.50, 50cl,l’Art du Vin).

For white chocolate, meanwhile, I’d go for something sweet but delicate, such as the honeyed floral and subtly tropical-fruited charm of the Rhône’s Domaine de Coyeux Muscat de Beaumes de Venise NV (from £11.50, 37.5cl, Booths) and for milk chocolate, a softly aged older tawny port, such as Tesco Finest 10 Year Old Tawny Port NV(£14.75), with its rich dried fig, nuts and citrus peel.

Many of these chocolate-friendly wines will go with cheese, too, as would an Italian I’ve earmarked for a spread of picky bits and small plates in a mezze style: the subtly pink-coloured, delightfully fennel-scented and grapefruit-tangy Specogna Friuli Colli Orientali Pinot Grigio Ramato 2024 (£22.50, the Wine Society), a gorgeous organic version of the northern Italian ramato style, which gives the pinot grigio a bit of extra time in contact with its pink-tinged skins during the winemaking process.

For the Friday fish, I’m going for biodynamic muscadet from France’s Loire estuary that is every bit as nervy, complex, mineral and refreshing as a Chablis: Domaine de la Pépière Muscadet Sèvre et Maine sur Lie 2024 (£16.75, Terra Wines). And for the lamb, Larry Cherubino Uovo Nebbiolo Cabernet 2024 (from £23.49, Wine Reserve), a red from Western Australia’s Frankland River region with a wholly appropriate seasonal label and name that is, in fact, a reference to the winemaking vessel that helps render its plush, silky, dark-fruited purity: the concrete egg.