Festive Drinking: A Red and White Christmas by Matt Walls

I wonder what Scrooge’s idea of the perfect Christmas lunch would be? Roast pauper with all the trimmings I suspect, washed down with a few bottles of claret.  Well if you can’t treat yourself on Christmas Day, when can you?

If you’re opting for a more traditional roast this year, different types of meat taste their best with different types of wine. The general rule of thumb is the more intense the flavour, the more intense the wine to go with it. Matt Walls, author of ‘Drink Me! How To Choose, Taste and Enjoy Wine’, gives us his recommendations for festive drinking.

Drink Me! How to Choose, Taste and Enjoy Wine by Matt Walls (Quadrille Publishing, £12.99)

Glazed ham

Ham is pretty versatile when it comes to wine, but whites that have freshness and richness in tandem often work a treat – like an Alsace Pinot Gris, or an Australian Semillon Sauvignon. For something a bit different, you could try a Chenin Blanc from the Loire Valley – their autumnal apple and quince flavours backed up with a zingy bite can work well, particularly if the ham is served with a fruit sauce or honey glaze.

Good: Château de la Roulerie ‘Les Grandes Brosses’ Chenin Blanc 2011, Loire, France (£8.75; Oddbins)

Roast goose

Goose, eh? Get you. There’s something wonderfully decadent about roasting a goose though I must admit: partly how it starts out plump then gradually shrinks as you spoon off ladles of fat from the roasting pan below. The meat is richer and darker than turkey, so whether you go white or red, you need something with plenty of flavour and natural acidity to stand up to the richness of the meat. If you want white, try a dry Riesling from the Pfalz or Mosel in Germany (it will be dry if it says trocken on the label). If you’re going red, try something medium-bodied with a bit of spice – maybe a Syrah from the Rhône or New Zealand, or a Cabernet Franc from the Loire.

Good: Sainsburys ‘Taste the Difference’ Crozes-Hermitage 2010, Rhône, France (£9.79, Sainsburys)

Turkey with all the trimmings

I suspect there’ll be a fair few more of us eating turkey than goose this year. They may both be birds, but the meat is very different and calls for a different approach. Turkey is relatively mild in flavour, sometimes with a slightly earthy side, so opt for a medium intensity white wine like a lightly oaked Chardonnay. Red wine can also work well if you prefer, but try and veer towards the less full-bodied end of the scale – so avoid powerful Shirazes or Cabernet Sauvignons and go for a lighter style like a Beaujolais or a Pinot Noir.

Good: La Grille Pinot Noir 2010, St-Pourçain, France (£6.99; Majestic Wines)

Very good: Jean Foillard Morgon 2010, Beaujolais, France (£23.00; Green & Blue Wines)

Rib of beef

Roast beef loves a big chunky rich red wine. You’re safe with pretty much anything full-bodied and red. If it’s from a hot country, chances are it will be more powerfully flavoured. If it’s too light, like a Valpolicella, you won’t be able to taste the wine very much and it might taste a bit sour. This is the only time where you really need a red wine for the match to work; if you do want a white on the table too, go for something rich, flavoursome and maybe a bit oaky. Definitely not Sauvignon Blanc, it never works very well with red meat. Choices like an Aussie Shiraz, a Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon or an Argentinean Malbec would all fit the bill, or powerful reds from Spain and Portugal.

Good: Tesco ‘Finest*’ Stellenbosch Red Blend 2010, South Africa (£9.99; Tesco)

Very good: Palacios ‘Camins del Priorat’ 2009, Priorat, Spain (£17.95; Green & Blue Wines)

Christmas pudding

Stuffed or not, there’s nothing more pleasing at the end of the meal than digging your spoon into a steaming chunk of Christmas pud and inhaling the boozy vapours. Sweet foods call for sweet wines, but instead of going for the traditional golden Sauternes from France, consider one of the darker, browner wines that contain more dried fruit and nut notes rather than fresh fruit flavours. That way you are marrying the flavour of the pud with the flavour of the wine. Try a fortified wine. If you haven’t drank one for a while, you’ll wonder why not on revisiting them, good ones are utterly delicious, great value and work really well with food. Try a sweet Oloroso sherry, a Malmsey madeira or a tawny port. They’d all go well with a mince pie, too.

Good: Tesco Finest* Late Bottled Vintage Port 2006, Portugal (£10.00; Tesco)

Very good: Grant Burge 10 Year Old Tawny, Australia (£19.75; Slurp.co.uk)

To find out more about Matt’s forthcoming sampling sessions or to read his blog, go to www.mattwalls.co.uk

First published in The Transmitter Magazine (November 2012)

Matt Walls’ first book arrives at the Quadrille office

Fed up with mediocre wine but not sure how to go about spotting the diamond bottles from the dross? Fear not! With Drink Me!, part of Quadrille’s exciting New Voices in Food series, as your guide you will soon be extracting the maximum pleasure from every mouthful.

In this exciting new book, vintner and blogger Matt Walls points you towards the right bottle for every occasion, revealing the main different types of wine, the wine styles within each type and the brands or producers that are the most reliable.

Here’s some images from the book:

the cover

the inside front cover!

a sample chapter

a lovely quote from Fiona Beckett

and an equally lovely quote from Tim Atkin

The book will be out in the shops in around 2 months time. For further details about the book, just click on any of the images above!

Guest post from Matt Walls: Why wine talk makes people feel uncomfortable

Matt Walls writes:

The nose and mouth can sometimes be a little vague in the way they try  and tell us what they’re sensing. Smell and taste are not as powerful or precise in their function as sight or touch. So it helps to talk about what you are smelling or tasting. Sometimes you can’t quite put your finger on a particular smell, or don’t even notice one that is staring you in the face until someone mentions it. People often suspect that a lot of bullshit is talked about wine. I’ve encountered some hilarious descriptions of wines when marketing departments have strayed from describing actual flavours into the realms of poetic whimsy. But most of the time, it’s not what is said that’s the problem, just the way it is said.

Why wine talk makes people feel uncomfortable

1.Eccentric wine commentators

For some reason, wine has had more than its fair share of wacky commentators over the years, but you really don’t have to wear a monocle and bark in rhyming couplets to talk about it. A British critic still invoked today starred on a 1980s-90s BBC TV show called Food and Drink. It was a great show that helped make food and wine more accessible for a lot of people, but a presenter called Jilly Goolden offered some ebullient, vivid and occasionally baffling descriptions of what she tasted. Few, if any, other programmes at the time featured wine, so it was many people’s only experience of hearing anyone talk about it. Goolden’s slightly bizarre delivery and descriptions frightened some people away, yet she’s not the world’s only wine eccentric. I suppose a glass of red liquid on a TV screen isn’t that interesting without someone trying to convey the aromas and flavours that make it special. But don’t worry: talking about wine doesn’t make you batty. That’s all in the delivery. And the bow ties.

2.It’s a bit ‘posh’

Wine is sometimes considered one of the last bastions of the middle and upper classes. This is a pretty outdated point of view. Truth is, most wine is bought at the supermarket during the weekly shopping expedition alongside the baked beans and toilet roll – not brought up from the cellar by Jeeves to accompany  truffled swan. Fifty years ago, all food or drink shipped over from abroad was a luxury, but nowadays a bottle of great wine needn’t cost any more than a night down the pub. Wine is something for everyone to enjoy;

those who think it’s elitist should spend a night on the town with some Australian winemakers.

3.Not knowing which terms to use

For most wine drunk on a day-to-day basis, we only need to use fairly simple terms. Is it sweet or dry? Is it high in acidity? Does it have a lot of tannin? Can you detect any oak flavours? What other flavours do you taste: just fruit flavours, or others like nuts, herbs, spices?

To begin with, when trying to identify particular elements, it can feel odd saying you taste apples, pears and melons in a glass of wine; after all, it’s made of grapes. But when it ages in bottle or barrel, the various constituents in a wine react with each other, creating new flavour compounds that can be exactly the same as those found in other plants or foods. So, when you’re tasting a wine and you can taste strawberries, it may not be the case that the wine simply tastes like strawberries; in all likelihood you’re tasting the very same flavour compound actually found in a strawberry. So, if you ever feel self-conscious or silly naming some of the various flavours you’re getting – don’t. Chances are, you are actually tasting them.

When drawing conclusions about wine, think BLIC: Balance, Length, Intensity, Complexity. What’s the overall balance of all the wine’s elements? How long does the flavour linger in the mouth? How intense are the flavours and aromas? And how many identifiable aromas and flavours can you find – i.e. how complex is it? These are the criteria to think about when judging wine quality.

4.‘Getting it wrong’

Some people avoid talking about wine for fear of ‘getting it wrong’. We’ve all tasted hundreds of different flavours in different foods and drinks, and we trust our palates normally. Wine is no different, and there’s no reason to doubt our sense of taste. Making a judgment about the sugar, acidity or alcohol levels in a wine is no more difficult than judging the salt, vinegar or greasiness levels in a bag of chips. It’s a myth that you need some kind of special abilities to be able to taste and enjoy wine. If you have a nose and a mouth, there’s no reason you can’t enjoy it just as much as anyone else.

As for using the ‘wrong’ word to describe a wine, stick to natural flavours and you’ll be fine. Name any fruit, vegetable, herb, spice or animal product and there’ll be a wine out there somewhere that contains that flavour. Sometimes it’s fun to use random words, but if you’re really trying to communicate, it’s easier to compare flavours and aromas to other types of food or drink. And as for judging quality levels, don’t forget that it’s just a matter of taste. When all is said and done, it’s not easy to buy a genuinely dreadful wine these days. Once in a while you might get a bottle that isn’t exactly what you expected, but that’s all part of the fun.

This an exclusive extract from Matt’s forthcoming book, Drink Me! How to choose, taste and enjoy wine, published by Quadrille in May 2012.

For more of Matt’s musings, go to http://www.mattwalls.co.uk/