Memories of Christmas past
From the Wine and Food Diary of Giles MacDonogh
Every Christmas we muster ‘dusty bottles’ (as one regular reader calls them). It is a rare opportunity to forage around and filch out a few good things to drink with the feast. I am sorry to say there are fewer good bottles every year, only the dust increases exponentially.
Books don’t help, and there are still plenty of those. The books are a consolation, but they have become completely valueless.A testament to a lost civilisation.To be honest, the wine stock looks a bit sad. We have no more great white burgundy and the red is thinning out, I suspect we may have had the last bottle of port, but my daughter has volunteered some of hers for next year. We have finished off my small stock of well-tempered Amarone; but… there are things we do have, and we will just have to adapt. We intend to go down drinking, well.
Advent is not really a time for putting out great wines, so we begin to relax only after the sun goes down on Christmas Eve and the tree goes up. There was a good menu. I had managed to secure the ingredients for the traditional terrine and there was a single lobster for the three of us fish eaters. I turned that into a salad with some homemade mayonnaise.
Then we had a brill with dill butter followed by cheese (Vacherin Mont d’Or, St Marcellin and Colston Bassett Stilton). The last course was my wife’s coffee and chestnut bûche de Noël.
Two of the wines came from the Wine Society: the Champagne (which has been made by the excellent firm of Alfred Gratien in Epernay for as long as anyone can remember), and a 2020 Chablis 1er cru Montmains (JM Brocard) with the brill. It was perfect, old-fashioned Chablis with that flintiness we all love.
With the cheese I pulled out my last 1990 Bordeaux: a Château Patâche d’Aux. which was decent enough: quite gamy, filling out in a decanter after five minutes or so but not really a star.With the bûche there was a 1993 Royal Tokaji 5 puttonyos. It was very dark, and smelled deliciously of orange marmalade. Then we tripped off to midnight mass to breath wine over the Dominicans.
Christmas Day starts with a thick chunk of panettone for breakfast. I don’t make fresh bread until the panettone is finished. For the past three years we have also had a Venezuelan pan de jamón while we sit round the tree. The recipe is for a brioche dough rolled up with ham, smoked bacon, olives and raisins. We omit the raisins as we’d rather have a wholly savoury foil to our champagne, this year a 1995 Laurent Perrier.
The champagne was magnificent. It is left over from my son’s baptism. He didn’t have any then but he is very keen now. It was light amber in colour and had the tiniest bead and smelled of peaches and dried herbs. With the terrine there was a 2020 Lyrarakis Assyrtiko from Crete.
It was lovely last year, but had gone a bit soft. Clearly it is best young. What you really want is a Gewürztraminer or a Muscat and not too sweet, but I didn’t have any of that.
Again, we honoured the tradition and ate roast rib of well-hung heifer meat, roasties and red cabbage, but it was sent in with two disappointing 1996 burgundies – the Clos de la Bussière Morey St Denis from Roumier and the Loïs Dufouleur Beaune Premier cru Clos du Roi (one of fewer than 2,000 bottles). The Morey St Denis was the first poor-performing Roumier wine I have ever had. If you tried to buy it now, you’d fork out £650 –
£850, but obviously I didn’t pay anything like that. I decanted it but it just sat there all hunched up in the glass and wouldn’t come out. It had a good structure and some restrained cherry fruit, but it was not a cloud-gatherer.
The Clos du Roi was a bit coarse and blowsy – the opposite to the Roumier, but that wasn’t what I wanted either.
There remained plenty of 1993 Royal Tokaji and some 2000 Quinta do Portal port, which was pleasant, but understated with its bouquet of black fruits.As the New Year has no culinary traditions in Britain, we have adopted an Italian one. After some lively Sicilian Grillo, there was the Zampone (or stuffed pig’s trotter) with lentils, tomato salsa and mash. We drank a 2015 Musella Amarone della Valpolicella. This came with many encomiums and was not cheap. It was very concentrated and impressive, but not yet able to give real pleasure: it was a mite too young. With a Maltese nut cake, we had the 1991 Royal Tokaji Nyulászó five puttonyos: a beautiful wine, also quite black, and tasting of apricots, mangoes, dried herbs and liquorice.
By the end of the year, we had been reduced to three as my daughter had to go back to work in Germany. The sweet wines all performed well with various puddings: two Austrians, a 2006 Sämling Trockenbeerenauslese from Bernd Heilig, and a really good, pineappley Grüner Veltliner Eiswein from Rudolf Rabl excelled, but I was still looking for a memorable red.
Then in the middle of the night I remembered two bottles of Herdade do Mouchão I had been sitting on for over thirty years because I couldn’t think of the right person to share them with; so, on a grim, soggy night between Boxing Day and the Epiphany, I opened one. The cork came out in bits but there was a promising smell as I tipped it into the decanter, and suddenly it opened out with a shuddering length, and explosion of black fruits: cherries, figs and blackberries. It was a triumph, and all the more so when you think that eighty percent of the grapes that made the wine came from the largely decried Alicante Bouschet grape.
I remembered how much I had been impressed with the wines when I had them in the Alentejo with the winemaker Iain Richardson. His mother was a Reynolds, the family which brought the eucalypt to Portugal from New Zealand, and which owned huge estates planted with cork oaks. So, when the last occasion associated with Christmas presented itself – Epiphany – I opened the second bottle to go with a simple beef stew with suet
dumplings. The cork came out in bits again, but the wine was just as lovely. Then came the galette des rois which I had made that morning, matched with a lovely Moscato di Pantelleria, which I had bought for a song from Lidl.
Now we settle in for the miserable month of January.
