How To Host Christmas

The festive season offers plenty of occasions for wine lovers to enjoy their favourite bottles. But what should you serve when? Fiona Beckett offers practical tips for perfect wine service at home

- Fiona Beckett

For any wine lover, Christmas offers the opportunity to bring out the best bottles in the cellar – but is this the wisest strategy? The truth is that the Christmas meal, with its stuffing, sauces and sides, is a bit of a wine killer – and there may well be family members around your table who would frankly rather be drinking their favourite Chilean Merlot.

Still, it’s your Christmas as well as everyone else’s and if you don’t drink your best bottles on one of the biggest occasions of the year, then when do you drink them? At least that’s how I justify it.

The ideal answer, I think, is to have two or three bottles on the table to cater for every taste. If we’re talking turkey, that should include a white as well as a red. At a Decanter tasting a few years ago we were amazed that a​ Chassagne-Montrachet stood up as well as the very posh reds we’d lined up, and I’d certainly have a relatively young red alongside a more mature one – not least as back-up if you find a wine is corked or over the hill. Magnums always go down well on the Christmas table and definitely provide the wow factor.

On the table