A Christmas Medley

This is the season to bring a long saved wine out of your cellar or closet and serve it with a festive holiday dinner. After all, one of the pleasures of having a collection of wine is that you buy them when the bottles are young (and, until recent years, relatively affordable). This is also the time when you will have the best selection of wines from a new vintage. But wines are to drink, not to collect, like postage stamps on an album page.

The Christmas roast fairly cries out for a vintage Bordeaux. We will have a fine white Bordeaux to start, a Château Carbonnieux 2005, and the red wine will be a Château Belair 1982, that was given to me long years ago by Pascal Delbeck, then cellar master at that St. Emilion estate. We had a bottle recently, and it was lush and flavorful. The Carbonnieux blanc is often served in Bordeaux as the entry wine for festive dinners. It is crisp and flavorful, with good body, but it does not overdo it, instead setting the stage for fine wines and flavors to come. We will finish with a treasured half bottle of Sauternes, Château Suiduiraut 1982.

For New Year’s dinner, duck or goose will be on the menu. So we will look to the Rhône and to Burgundy for assertive, flavorful wines. To start, there will be a Chablis premier cru, a Louis Michel Les Vaillons 2005. We will then continue with a savory Châteauneuf du Pape, a Bosquet des Papes 1998. We will toast the New Year with nonvintage Perrier Jouet champagne, which is light and flavorful, a festive champagne, and still an affordable pleasure.

And then I’ll think about replenishing my wne cellar – once the dollar starts to gain some traction against the euro!

Holiday Punch

What to serve at your holiday party in these difficult times? You’ll want something good and warming and inexpensive. The cold weather holiday season requires a hot punch. This is not the time for nuanced wine tasting anway. It is the season for festivity, and a drink that warms you up while announcing its presence throughout the house with savory odors of the season. Such a drink is my hot wassail punch, refined over the years to taste.

It all began actually when someone made me a present of a bottle of brandy that was basically at the low end of the scale, too bad to serve, almost up to diluting with water as a fine à l’eau, but having a certain rigorous power.

As a base for a punch, this might do rather well. But what to add? Then I remembered the great pleasure of taking a hot buttered rum on the terrace of the Rhumerie Martinique in Paris. I wondered if it is still there, dispensing inexpensive cheer near the student section of the Left Bank. And so the welcoming smell of a warm drink became part of what I was looking for. Finally, I remembered how pleasant sangria can be on warm evenings. If that was the case in the summer, why wouldn’t the basic recipe adapt itself for winter drinking, this time warmed instead of chilled?

And so inexpensive red wines were added. This is definitely not the place for your prize wines, nor for anything delicate. What you want is something with fruity flavor that will hold up, something like jug Rhône wine (for those of you lucky enough to be in Provence), or perhaps a Hearty Burgundy. That’s too thick by itself, and will get more so if heated. So I cut it with soda water as the punch is warmed. And I add sugar to taste, and orange peels studded with cloves.

It was good, but not very Christmasy. Something else was definitely needed, a spice perhaps. You don’t want to know the various spices that were tried over the years and discarded. Finally I found the right one, and by far the most expensive ingredient of the punch. It is cardamom. A little does go a very long way, but as it is heated, the odor, combined with the wine and brandy and other spicy smells, gives a welcoming note of wassail to your guests.

This is not a terribly expensive punch, and it fits the season exactly. It does need attention, though. Don’t just let it boil away. I make a large amount on the stove, at very low temperature for half an hour or so before the guests arrive. You can experiment and put it on medium for a few minutes, then lower the temperature if you are pressed for time. The pot I use is a large one, that did good service when apples were dunked in it during Hallowe’en parties for our children. It fits over four different burners on the stove, and seems to attract guests like a magnet. Have one or two other punch stations, and fill those bowls from the central warming punch as needed.

Here is my recipe. Feel free to vary the ingredients. I find it serves 50-75 happy people.

Wassail Punch Recipe

Combine one bottle of brandy with four magnums of sturdy red wine, heating evenly as the wine is added. Add six bottles of soda water, not all at once. Stir in sugar to taste. (I start with two cups, then add more as needed.) Decorate with whole orange peels studded with cloves. Add a teaspoonful of cardomom. Thoroughly mix the punch, stirring slowly with a wooden spoon (so that your fingers don’t get burned). Warm slowly and thoroughly. Serve when new acquaintances start to act like old friends. NOTE: If you have an apron from a pricey bar or bistro, wearing it is encouraged once a year. This is your moment. Merry Christmas!

A Christmas Wine Book

Have you finished your holiday wine and wine gift shopping? It’s harder this year, but there are still some good buys available. For a wine book, I recommend the well-researched and entertaining The Billionaire’s Vinegar, by Benjamin Wallace. It recounts the frenzied bidding for supposedly genuine bottles of wine ordered by Thomas Jefferson when he was our Minister in Paris. The author’s research is thorough, and his description of wine mavens and their collecting frenzies over the past several decades is exact and amusing.

He does me the favor of noting that when I was Consul General in Bordeaux, I was one of a small handful to sound the alarm that these newly discovered bottles might not be genuine. The further question is why so many wine authorities tasted the wine repeatedly and thought it might be genuine. After all, Bordeaux wines of that time were fermented in oak casks from the Baltic region, which produced a much lighter style of wine. That is why this wine was called “clairet,” which became the British term “claret,” meaning wine in a light style. But it is hard to make this point, when all the “experts” are fooled!