Reminiscing about Christmas Food & Wines 2022
Posted: 3rd January 2023
We are getting old. The house is the oldest, followed by me. The children are still young, but they too are getting older and they like wine more and more. With wine the story is much the same. We subsist on cheap stuff from local shops, but a lot of the rest is old. Some is certainly on the brink of being too old to drink, but it soldiers on, festering before the mellowing year; a situation aggravated by the infrequency with which we take a punt on some of these old bottles, I still abide by the illusion that we are waiting for the appropriate person to drop round to share them with us. ‘Some day he’ll come along…’
Certain collections are dying out. This year we said goodbye to my last bottle of great Italian wine. We have no more top white burgundy, and the red Burgundy cache is thinning out. We are also down to our last bottle of vintage port, although that is something only ever opened at Christmas. Even if there were to be some sort of windfall in 2023, I would still find it a problem to lay my hands on any really mature wines at realistic prices. With time we will have to accept that the wines we drink at Christmas may not be as good as they were.
As ever the tree went up after sunset on the 24th, and we waited for a friend to come round for dinner. She arrived clutching a bottle of Boller (which was unexpected), so we drank that before going on to the Gardet Brut Tradition that we were going to offer her. Gardet in Chigny-les-Roses, just south-east of Reims was the house champagne of le père Legrand in the Galerie Vivienne when I discovered it in the eighties. With champagne selling for knock-out prices, it is still notably good value. Of course it hardly compares to Boller, but it kept its end up, even with the smoked salmon.
This was the side of Achill Island salmon I brought back from Sligo earlier in the month. It is wonderful stuff: not wild, but the fish are kept in cages off the coast of Mayo and the cure is quite old fashioned, so the salmon is oily, smoky and rich and not that bland stuff we have got used to here. With our lobsters we had a 2020 Chablis 1er Cru Montmains, from Jean-Marc Brocard, shipped by the Wine Society under its Exhibition label. It was perfect, classic Chablis. To accompany the hard cheeses that evening (very good Colston Bassett stilton, a truffle pecorino and some proper, gooey taleggio from my friends Tony and Steve at Salvino) there was a bottle of 1990 Château Patâche d’Aux, which was in excellent condition – again a classic, mature Médoc wine. There was even a 1998 vintage port from the Quinta do Silval, with that gum cistus aroma I like so much, but it was not robust and went unto decline on the second day. The quinta is owned by the Magalhães family. Generally anglicised as ‘Magellan’ they claim descent from the great explorer Ferdinand. The port was served with my wife’s bûche de Noël filled with sweet chestnut purée.
We had intended to go to Midnight Mass but the wine got the better of us. We went the next day. The organist sang a plainchant version of the Mass and there were three good hymns which only we seemed to sing with any gusto. That’s what a Protestant schooling will do for you. Then there were presents around the tree with a bottle of 2013 Grand Cru Le Mesnil champagne, a really lovely rich, pure chardonnay wine. As I have done these past three years, I made a Venezuelan Pan de jamón stuffed with ham, bacon and olives. I had been able to get the elements for my Christmas terrine this year, so later, while we cooked the beef, we had some slivers on toast. I don’t like a heavy sweet wine with this and would have naturally opted for some Alsatian Gewürztraminer if I had had any. I opened a bottle of white 2020 Domaine des Anges instead.
The beef was our standard dry-aged heifer forerib, with red cabbage and roast potatoes. With this I chose some 1995 Savigny-les-Beaune Premier Cru Les Lavières from the Domaine Chandon de Briailles. The trick with these older Burgundies is knowing when to open them. I pulled the cork as we sat down to dinner and decanted the wine. It took about ten minutes to open up and was really lovely, but it faded within half an hour, so you needed to be quick off the mark. There were runny cheeses from La Fromagerie: a vacherin mont d’or, which was perfect, and a saint-marcellin that never happened. It curled up in its little terracotta dish like an old slipper and refused to budge. We had a Sussex pond pudding. There was plenty of port left but also a call for a sweet wine, so I found a Tokay 5 Puttonyos I’d bought for £12.99 from Lidl. It was astonishingly good, not fat and cloying but with a wonderful honeyed structure. I am only sorry that I didn’t buy more.
For the other days of Christmas the wines are the standard offering here, but to amuse my son I uncorked a couple of bottles of beer which must have been acquired in 1987 or 1988. I had been warned that they would be over the top. One as an ordinary Grimbergen (7 ABV) with a champagne cork, and the other was the ‘tripel’ version (8.6 ABV). The latter had ullaged to mid-shoulder, so it was no surprise that it had lost its sparkle. Still it had a great taste for a few minutes at least: dark chocolate and cherries. The simple beer had ullaged less and there was a little effervescence still, although that stopped quickly. There was even a hoppy bitterness and some of the chocolate taste of its big brother: not bad for a thirty-five year old.
New Year’s Eve we celebrate in an Italian way with a zampone stuffed pig’s trotter, lentils (they represent all the money you are going to make in the New Year in order to buy more wine) some tomato passata and mashed potatoes. The wine for this was my last bottle of 1997 Masi Costasera Amarone Classico. As always, it seems, it was pretty well the star of the show with its huge concentration of fruit. Age, it seems, cannot wither it. My wife had made a Maltese chocolate cake that tasted a bit like a panforte, and with that we had a bottle of Münzenrieder’s 1997 Sämling Trockenbeerenauslese from Burgenland. It was the colour of teak, but old as it was it had lost none of its loveliness on the palate. Now I will have to find something to top it when I bring out the galette des rois on 6 January.
