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.
