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Andrew Jefford: ‘A Christmas wine should be one to spend time over’


red wine in glass

In the northern hemisphere mid-latitudes where many Decanter readers live, late December means damp cold and blanketing darkness. The Christian narrative lends this moment a spiritual charge for believers – but the winter solstice was of signal significance in pre-Christian times, too, as light drained and ‘The world’s whole sap is sunk’ (John Donne’s phrase from his magnificent Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day). Go to Maeshowe on Scotland’s Orkney, a 5,000-year-old burial tomb, and you’ll find its entrance passage designed to align with the last rays of the sun at the midwinter solstice, as if to beseech light to return. For all our comfort and plenty, we still need that reassurance.

Deep red wine is our readiest symbol of summer sunlight and warmth, stowed safely away inside a bottle: the resumé of an entire growing season. Unconsciously, perhaps, the return of that light – and a little nourishing rest in the interim – is what we’re hoping for when we drink our treasured bottles at Christmas.

The wine world, though, spins far out beyond northern Europe. If you’re a wine enthusiast in Singapore, late December is as stickily hot as any other time of the year; if you’re a wine enthusiast in Adelaide or Cape Town, it’s time to lounge on the beach, clamber into a boat or fire up the barbecue. Christmas wines in these climes mean refreshment, cool limpidity. Wine, in both cases, is an antidote to the trials of the season and a token that promises change.

Maybe the key is time, then? A Christmas wine should be one to spend time over, and to reflect on ‘Time past and time future/What might have been and what has been’ – TS Eliot’s famous obsession in Burnt Norton. For the midlife time-poor, that’s a powerful attraction in itself; in later years, though, you may find you have more time than you’d like. A Christmas wine, then, would be one to share. With family (‘There are always Uncles at Christmas’, as Dylan Thomas wrote in A Child’s Christmas in Wales) or with precious friends. If a solitary Christmas is your lot, a cherished bottle would be the key to unlock memories of time spent with family and friends: the roots and branches of our lives.

Let’s summarise. A religious and spiritual symbol; a promise of renewal; an aid to recuperative rest; an antidote to the rigours of the season; a bottle to lavish time over; a succession of glasses to share with those we love; and a path back to happy memories. That’s a fully functional Christmas wine.

Have I got ‘definitive recommendations’ to capture all of that? Of course not. Only you can know what might serve.

It’s not the name, the price or the score of the Christmas wine that matters; it’s what that wine means to you. Every glass of wine you’ve drunk has added a line or two to your wine story: a precious personal resource. A wine story is the way wine has inhabited us, educated us, brought joy to us, nourished us, added meaning to our changing lives, been a lifelong friend. It’s a thread, linking our happiest moments. Christmas is a chance to read the story again – and add a few more lines. Like, perhaps, Auntie Hannah did.

Auntie Hannah ‘who liked Port’, as Dylan Thomas remembered from that Child’s Christmas, and ‘stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush’. A little later in the afternoon, she ‘laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year’. And finally she ‘got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody laughed again’. It’s just an example among many (and I’m sure you can improve on parsnip wine and rum laced tea); but there are worse.

In my glass this month

As I write, Christmas is still some time away – but I do remember enjoying Allegrini’s La Grola IGT Veronese 2017 from shortly after Christmas last year: the moment is now a…


Source : https://www.decanter.com/magazine/andrew-jefford-a-christmas-wine-should-be-one-to-spend-time-over-544405/

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