A trio of rich and rewarding wines to bring out the best of each course in your Christmas meal
Sax Grüner Veltliner Zwillingslauser, Kamptal, Austria 2019 (£13.50, stonevine.co.uk) There’s a lot going on in the classic Christmas roast dinner. So much, in fact, that it makes the sort of finicky/precise (delete according to temperament) food and wine matching you might try out on a less cacophonous dish all but impossible. I mean, ideally, the wine I’d choose to have with a warm winter’s evening dinner of sprouts fried with bacon would be very different from the one I’d have with a piece of turkey breast, or cauliflower slathered in bread sauce or an umami-rich mushroom-based nut roast. When it comes to choosing wines for what is essentially a buffet, then, I reckon it’s best to go to either end of wine’s structural extremes: something with plenty of acidity to refresh and cut through; or something robust that can stand up to the flavour and textural variety. Fitting the first of those bills: Weingut Sax’s scintillating, finely balanced, citrus tangy, pear-apple fleshy beauty of a dry white.
Domaine Bernard Metrat La Roilette Vieilles Vignes, Fleurie, Beaujolais, 2018 (£16.99, virginwines.co.uk) Other whites that share that nervy, wake-up-call freshness and clarity include steel-backboned Australian rieslings such as Jim Barry The Lodge Hill Riesling, Clare Valley 2019 (£12.50, Marks & Spencer), with its ripple of lime and peach; and silvery Chablis such as the impeccably cool Nathalie & Gilles Fèvre Chablis 2018 (from £16.99, robertsandspeight.co.uk; robertrolls.com). When it comes to refreshing reds, the warmth of the Alentejo in southern Portugal wouldn’t usually be my first port of call, but the explosively fresh but deep, violet-edged berry fruitiness of the unoaked Fitapreta A Touriga Vai Nua 2019 (£14.95, swig.co.uk) would be brilliant at quenching the thirst and refreshing the appetite on Friday. It’s reminiscent in some ways of good honest Beaujolais, a style that also works well with all manner of festive (and everyday) feasting: for a bright and very pretty example, I loved the floral lilt and cherry fruit of Domaine Bernard Metrat’s Fleurie.