A Christmas spent in Ireland inevitably meant there would be some changes to the usual celebrations. Crucially, there would be no falling back on the home wine cellar, where bottles are selected and matured for drinking at the year’s end. Instead, with just two specimens in the suitcase, the task was to source wine locally; the brief a selection of reds and whites to suit a range of palates and ingredients. A Christmas Eve trip to Dublin’s finest wine shops an hour before closing time concentrated the mind and, job done, there was still time for a quick pub visit before heading back. The claim of ‘I never touch whiskey’ has now been laid to rest.
Christmas Eve imposes a requirement for judicious measures before Midnight Mass; after that the gloves are off. Dinner was a glorious venison casserole, the meat marinated over a number of days, finished in an agrodolce style (meaning both sweet and sour), with the addition of some bitter chocolate at the end of the cooking period. To accompany, an Italian red from Emilia Romagna, a natural wine from the Sangiovese grape with some residual sugar. A fairly modest wine with a superbly executed casserole, this was as close to food and wine pairing heaven as it’s possible to get. Having kept a lid on alcohol consumption before church meant the fizz on our return was particularly well received. The bottle – Dermot Sugrue’s The Trouble with Dreams - had travelled from its vineyard in the Sussex Downs back to the winemaker’s native home in time for Christmas.
Nothing particularly extravagant was opened for lunch on Christmas Day, for the reasons already mentioned, but bottles were chosen to complement the many different elements of the feast. While roast turkey is an uncomplicated meat to pair with wine, the accompaniments are much trickier, with their high fat and salt content, and the clashing vinegary, sweet flavours of red cabbage. Well-balanced, unoaked Chardonnays, a Quincy from the Loire Valley, an Albariño from Rías Baixas and a St Joseph proved up to the task.
With my role being to oversee the wine, cocktail production fell to others. While no expert, I acknowledge that cocktails are enjoying a resurgence, so trying a range of new drinks in front of a 3-hour film is a challenge I was quick to accept. Extraordinary concoctions followed in the form of Negronis, Corpse Survivors I and II and the now famous ‘mistake’ cocktail, the love child of cassis and Campari, which in the tradition of illegitimate children, remains nameless and also a real bastard.
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