Good food, staying cosy with your family, and filling your belly with warm drinks to insulate from the cold outside – that’s what Christmas is all about. In the following 6-minute read, we explore the best wines for Christmas time, how to pair wines with festive flavours, and recommend some gift-worthy bottles for the wine lover in your family. Whether you’re seeking a drink to accompany a sumptuous meal, or just looking for a great gift, the right bottle of wine makes everything so much better. That’s where our guide comes in.
The Tradition of Christmas Wines and Drinks
Christmas is essentially our modern version of midwinter celebrations, such as Yule and Saturnalia. Throughout history, these celebrations have always involved drinking, feasting, and gift-giving, all of which offer a feeling of abundance and joy to get us through the long winters.
Wine has always been an integral element of winter celebrations. This has been true since the days of Ancient Greece, when midwinter celebration involved Dionysus, the god of wine. In the modern day, any variety of wine can be considered a staple at Christmas time. Christmas wines range from sparkling whites to rich, distilled reds. The sheer abundance of flavours and styles has led many to Google, to ask the following questions:
- What does Christmas wine taste like?
Typical Christmas wines contain flavours like cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, roasted nuts, and ripe red fruits – the same flavours we associate with Christmas in general. These notes can be added to mulled wines through spices, but can also be found naturally in a lot of bold reds, and even some white or sparkling wines. - What alcohol is best for Christmas?
For Christmas dinner, it’s hard to go wrong with robust red wines, or even richer red options like Amarone or Port. For toasts, opt for sparkling wines.
After reading this article, if you’re still uncertain about the best wines to serve at Christmas, take a look at our Christmas Tasting Case. It’s our curated selection of wines, featuring all of the flavours we mentioned above.
It ranges from zesty sparkling whites to classic reds, like Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Order it as a gift to somebody else, or as a gift to yourself. Now, let’s deep dive into the flavours of Christmas, and how to best pair them with wine.
Festive Wine Pairings for Christmas Dinner
Welcome Drinks and Starters
Christmas starters vary from country to country and family to family, but they often include seafood bites, sausage rolls, or simple staples like breadsticks.
Sometimes, a sparkling wine on its own is all you need to get your mouth watering. You can serve it as an aperitif, or alongside a wide variety of canapés.
Perfect Aperitifs
Our very first recommendation is the Champagne Jacquesson Cuvee 747, a decadent non-vintage with complex layers of brioche and citrus. You can also find distinctly festive flavours of orange peel. This is the perfect welcome to any feast, and Champagne is sure to elevate any toast.
On the other side of the coin, Crémant refers to French fizzy wine made outside of the approved Champagne region. While “Champagne” conveys a feeling of grandeur, Crémant is just as good, and is often overlooked. This one from the Henri Champliau winery is great for pairing with smoked salmon canapés, and is packed with flavours of apple, pear, and almonds.
Pairing with Starters and Appetisers
No matter which part of Europe you’re in, seafood is a common sight at the Christmas dinner table. Whether it’s in the form of carp or prawn cocktails, it’s important to know what to pair with it.
Our big recommendation is this New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc from Greywacke. It’s light and playful in the mouth, with beautiful notes of citrus zest and herbs that won’t overpower even the most subtle seafood starters.
For richer appetisers, for example, savoury soups, sausage rolls, or foie gras (as they often serve in France), we recommend alternating between these two wines from Bread & Butter winery. Their Chardonnay is affordable and versatile. It’s buttery texture is perfect for matching terrines, nuts, and creamy pâtés.
If you’re in the mood for a red, Bread & Butter’s Pinot Noir is light enough to serve alongside starters, and its flavours of cranberry, baking spice, and toasted cedar make it an ideal Christmas wine.
The Main Event: Classic Christmas Dishes
As your Christmas feast gets richer and more filling, it’s time to break out the big guns: the robust red wines and age-worthy whites.
Turkey
This bird has a relatively light taste, with earthy undertones. The best wine for turkey needs to be something that is both juicy and complementary in terms of its flavour.
Our favourite is Chateau Purcari’s Pinot Noir, a perfectly balanced red wine from Moldova. It has a beautiful deep purple colour, and its notes of cherry, cranberry, and mushroom are a great match for a roast bird.
If you want something that provides more of a contrast, the Edmond de Rothschild Rimapere Sauvignon Blanc is also a great option. Its crisp acidity will cut through the turkey and cleanse the palate, while providing a refreshing contrast with notes of citrus and tropical fruit.
Beef
Whichever way you serve your beef at Christmas, it’s sure to be a rich and deeply savoury dining experience. You’ll need a full-bodied red wine to match it, preferably with angular acidity and plenty of tannins. Most will agree that Cabernet Sauvignon is the way to go.
Our recommendation is from California. The Caymus Cab Sav has been lauded by critics for its plush tannins and complex layers of ripe fruit. It’s just an unbeatable match for roast beef, and is a delicious wine in its own right, perfect for elevating your Christmas meal.
Goose
Recently, goose has become a rarity at the Christmas dinner table, but it remains a classic. It is often considered to be a fatty meat with a sweet yet rich taste, which is often elevated by the addition of herbs like rosemary and thyme. It needs an adventurous pairing, something equally bold, yet acidic enough to cut through the fat.
The Schloss Gobelsburg Riesling from the prestigious Ried Heiligenstein vineyard is up to the task.
It has a robust acidic structure, with festive notes of orange peel, dried herbs, and white wintery flowers.
Lamb
Lamb offers a slightly more gamey and more nuanced flavour than beef, but it is no less rich. It needs a bold red wine, but perhaps one that is less acidic, and more on the smooth, layered, and herbaceous side.
For that, Australian Shiraz is a great option. Our favourite is the Penfolds Bin 28 Shiraz, which is arguably one of the most iconic Australian reds you can buy.
It is made of Shiraz (also known as Syrah) grapes from across Southern Australia, and its rich black fruit and chocolate notes are a great partner for lamb.
Nut Roast
For vegetarians, nut roast is probably the most popular Christmas main course. It can be challenging to match nutty and herbaceous flavours. The best wine to pair with nut roast will have lots of herbs, and enough character to stand up to this dish’s notably earthy flavours. Perhaps a herby Grenache, or a full-bodied Chenin Blanc from the Loire?
For the Grenache, we can recommend Mora & Memo’s robust red from Sardinia, where Grenache is actually not called Grenache, but Cannonau.
It’s an ideal centrepiece for a Christmas dinner, bursting with flavours of black fruits and dried herbs.
Alternatively, Chenin Blanc offers an intriguing match up. Domaine Huet’s Le Haut Lieu Sec offers plenty of acidity, and striking notes of honey and yeast, which complement roasted nuts beautifully.
Festive Pairings for Desserts and Cheese
When the desserts and cheese boards come out at the tail end of the evening, it might seem like things are winding down. In terms of wine though, this is when things start to get really interesting.
Christmas Desserts
With dishes like Christmas pudding, mince pies, marzipan, or poppy seed cakes being eaten all over the continent, festive desserts can be just as rich as the main course. Here are a couple of our favourite sweet Christmas wines, packed with midwinter flavours.
For lighter desserts like mince pies, it’s hard to go wrong with a crowd favourite like Moscato. This sweet white wine from La Spinetta is a perfect example. It’s light in alcohol, has a slight effervescence, and is full of citrus and floral flavours: exactly what you need at this point in the evening.
For more filling Christmas desserts, what could be better than a wine with a similar character to Christmas pudding? That’s pretty much what you get with Amarone. This Northern Italian wine is famed for its flavours of dried fruits, chocolate, and spice. This example from Fasoli Gino is concentrated and powerful, a sumptuous partner for pudding or yule logs.
Cheese Boards
Cheese boards can offer a diverse range of flavours, so it can be difficult to find one wine to match them all. However, the cheese board is often the decadent end to an evening of feasting, and in our minds, there is one wine that stands out. Barolo is considered to be the king of red wine, and it’s the natural partner for a varied cheese board.
G.D. Vajra’s Barolo Ravera embodies everything you expect from a robust red, with structural tannins, powerful acidity, and layers of red fruit, liquorice, dried herbs, and orange peel. It’s certain to make any cheese board a full-on gastronomic experience.
Tips for Hosting with Wine
With all of these different wines at your disposal, it can seem like a complicated business to make sure you get the most out of them. However, there are a few general rules of thumb that make everything easier.
Sparkling wines, like Prosecco, Champagne, or Crémant, are best served chilled, straight out of the fridge. Try to use a flute-shaped glass, because it preserves the bubbles for longer, and forces the wine’s more subtle aromas towards your nose.
With white wines, like Chardonnay, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, or Moscato, they can be served slightly chilled (between 7 and 12°C). As a general rule, try to take them out of the fridge about 20-30 minutes before you serve them. You can get very specific with the glassware to use for different types of white wine, but generally speaking, you can use any standard wine glass.
Finally, red wines, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Grenache, Pinot Noir, and Syrah/Shiraz, are best when served slightly below room temperature (between 15 and 18°C). This essentially means doing the opposite to white wine, and putting them into the fridge for 20-30 minutes before you serve. For reds, wider-bowled glasses are good for exaggerating their aromas – but any standard wine glass will suffice too.
Christmas is a time of feasting, gathering, and comfort. As we can see from the history books, it is also deeply intertwined with the consumption of wine., so we suggest you make the most of it. The right bottle can make the festive season even more memorable.
If you still can’t find the perfect gift or the ideal pairing, keep in mind our specially curated Christmas Tasting Case, which can be delivered straight to your doorstep. Also keep in mind that none of these pairing suggestions are steadfast. Christmas can be a time of both tradition and experimentation: try unusual pairings, new gifts, and refresh yourself for the year to come. Cheers!
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