The Crimbo24 Selection

On Saturday December 7 we hosted an Open Season wine tasting featuring our recommendations for this festive season. You may have been there. In which case this is an aide memoire. If you weren’t, this is what you missed…

A guide for festive slurpers

Below you’ll find suggestions of wines selected to work with those key milestones of festive feasting from The Bubbles to Begin to A Sweet Finish. And if that were not enough, you’ll also find a selection of festive beers to keep you hydrated between feasts!

Open Season Wine Tastings

Every two or three months (it’s seasonal, but not strictly seasonal!) we invite our suppliers to furnish us with sample bottles of wines that we have selected for their seasonal suitability (rosés in the summer, sherry at Christmas, that kind of thing) and on an appointed Saturday afternoon we’ll get a couple of dozen bottles open and invite all-comers to drop in and have a sniff and a slurp. They’re always well attended and always great fun.

If you’d like prior notice of forthcoming Open Season tastings – and other events – please pop your email address into the box in the footer at the bottom of this page.

7 Steps to Christmas Heaven

Step 1: It Begins with Bubbles

Step 2: White and crisp and even

Step 3: Ultimate turkey sarnie whines (big whites)

Step 4: Light-but-powerful reds with the bird and aaalllll the trimmings

Step 5: Cheesy does it with big reds

Step 6: Sweet endings

Step 7: A festive beer selection

It Begins with Bubbles

Of course there are other ways of welcoming guests… a lightly microwaved Cup-a-Soup or a gently wielded crowbar are two that spring to mind, but maybe you didn’t grow up in the East Midlands? Anyway, nowadays us Rise & Viners like to get the party started with something sparkling. (TBH, things are not so bad if that’s how things carry on for the duration.) So here are our bubbly recommendations for Winter 2024…

M de Mongueret, Crémant de Loire £18

This light, clean and refreshing wine – imported directly by Rise & Vine and rarely found in other parts of the UK – offers soft lemon mousse, with hints of lime, bay leaf and honeysuckle.

Dival Cotel Champagne £28

Sometimes you want a Champagne that isn’t going to – let’s say – ‘stretch’ the bank. (Champagne is never exactly cheap.) Dival Cotel’s Champagne is one of those great finds that won’t overly challenge your bank but equally won’t challenge your oesophagus. No rasping acidity here, just toasty, bready flavours with some clean citrus notes on top.

La Garde Ecossaise Champagne £34

A classic light golden colour with aromas of white fruits like peach and apricot and a gentle citrus note. On the palate, it’s apples and pears with delicate ripe stone fruits, a luxurious creamy character and a touch of rich brioche.

Pierre Gimonnet et Fils ‘Cuis Premier Cru’ Champagne Blanc de Blancs £37

This delightful Blanc de Blanc – made purely from Chardonnay – offers lighter, more direct flavours than the traditional ‘classic cuvée’ of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier with a good squeeze of Sicilian lemon in the top notes, but underneath, due to longer maturation of the original wine, you’ll find notes of light honey and custard-creamy vanilla.

THE WHITES

So sophisticated smoked salmon – crisp whites

OK smoked salmon is a very popular and obvious choice, but really we only chose this over other smokey fish (trout? mackerel? eel?) because of the alliteration! So ‘tis the season to get smelly (fingers, anyway) and you may well be needing something to get those fishy fingers around. We served a smoked salmon paté at Open Season, so these are the four wines that we selected to go with that, but if you’re doing deeper, oilier fish, you might also try something like a Riesling with a hint of residual sugar – Adam in Pfarrgarten – or a dry-but-rich Gewurtztraminer, such as ours directly imported from Klipfel in the Alsace.

Chateau Dereszla, Dry Furmint £13

The same grapes as Hungary’s world-renowned sweet wine, Tokaji, but grapes harvested earlier, before the famous noble rot that creates the sweetness in Tokaji, and all of the natural sugars are allowed to ferment into alcohol. The result is a dry wine with some of the depth (and just a hint of residual sugar) that characterises its more famous counterpart and that work so well with smoked fish.

Domaine de la Ville de Colmar, Pinot Gris £18

With this one – which we import directly – there’s blossom with a hint of toffee on the nose. Light, floral flavours and toffee notes are also evident in the mouth with a delicately oily texture with a strong but not over-powering smoky element. All good stuff to go with smoky fish, no?

Verus Riesling £20

This Slovenian Riesling shows the characteristics of all good Riesling – crisp acidity, underlying smoky, oily notes – but you’ll also find more floral scents of apricot blossom in the nose. In the mouth, clean, green, crisp acidity balances floral flavours with richer, honeyed (Viognier-like) stone fruit and unctuous smoky notes.

‘Campo alla Casa’, Enrico Santini £24

Pale gold colour with the merest spritz, it shows aromas of pastry, green apple skin, grass and lime. The palate is zesty and citric, with blanched almonds and a pithy phenolic (olive oil-like) twist to the finish.

It’s the depth of flavour plus those oily, almond flavours that work so well with smoked fish.

With the bird – big whites

We tend to favour a light-but-powerful red with the festive feast (see below) but some just don’t go into the red zone. So with turkey and aaaalllll the trimmings you need something with a bit of power behind it. But don’t go with one of those old-school ‘butter-bomb’ Chardonnays. If you like your Chardonnay big and buttery, get one with a good acidity to balance those creamy notes and – with all that gravy, stuffing, roast this and roast that – it will help cut through all that fattiness too. Our go to Chardonnay for this is perennial favourite and Rise & Vine import, Origine Chardonnay.

Here are 4 more wines to do the same and which are also P-E-R-F-E-C-T with a turkey sarnie on Boxing Day!

The Duiker Cadenza £20

South African, oak-aged Sauvignon Blanc, full of smoky depth, also showing classic Southern Hemisphere tropical fruit plus an almost Marlborough-like zing but without the extreme cut grass and raw gooseberry that you might expect in the latter.

Coterie by Wildeberg £15

Another cracking wine by one of our favourite South African wineries, this classic Bordeaux Blanc blend does everything you’d expect of a similar wine from the old country with rich Semillon balancing crisp Sauvignon, but it brings particularly South African notes of smoke and tropical fruit to the party too.

Terruño, Castillo de Aresan £17

A proper big-but-balanced oak-aged Chardonnay. Those big, oaky flavours of toffee, honey and custard are balanced by clean, crisp green acidity with notes of pear and lime.

Valenciso Rioja Blanco £24

We overlook white Rioja at our peril. Especially when they’re as good as this one!

Complex aromas combining floral characters with preserved lemon and gently smoky notes. The palate is intense and broad with nuts, stone fruit, minerality and balancing citrus acidity on the finish.

THE REDS

With the bird – light-but-powerful reds

The challenge with the traditional festive feast is that it’s centrepiece is a delicately flavoured bird (particularly the breast) but all the flavours that surround it are big and rich and contrasting. So the ideal wine has to be big enough to not get lost against the cranberries, parsnips, red cabbage, baked ham, pigs-in-blankets, stuffing* etc, but not so big that it overpowers the poor old bird at the centre of all this. That’s why Pinot Noirs often work – not the really delicate ones, but ones with a bit of oomph…

(*For vegetarians, we adapt a nut-roast full of parsnips, fennel seeds and cashew nuts to double as stuffing.)

‘Esquisse’, Domaine des Hauts Chassis, Crozes-Hermitage £24

Zweigelt, Christophe Bauer £24

An unusual grape variety, Zweigelt, from Austria – an intense-yet-delicate wine, it’s inky purple with bright, rich, cherry/berry flavours and a hint of smoke. This one’s beautifully precise and organic too.

Maranges, Moillard-Grivot £34

We’ve been working hard in the past couple of years as meteorological and economic conditions have conspired to make Burgundy more and more expensive. Here’s a Burgundy Cru for less than 40 quid. Believe me, a decent one of them (like this) is harder and harder to find.

The Hitching Post Highliner £46

The only wine to have made its debut in a film – 2004’s Sideways. Pinot Noir from Santa Barbara California, aged in French Oak and bottled unfiltered. Vibrant fruit with an intense vein of spice and earthiness but always with balancing fresh acidity.

Cheesy does it – big reds

At some point you’re going to go all Tori Amos – “It’s got to be big” – and there’s more than a sporting chance that it could be with cheese. Here are four cheese friendly, big reds:

Salice Salentino £15

Call this the sophisticated elder brother of our perennial best-seller, Cantele Primitivo. From the same producer but from the Negroamaro grape, this offers similar rich, dark fruit flavours but has an earthier, more savoury character.

Les Coteaux Schisteux £19

A great value, impressive, classic southern Rhône. This big oaky Grenache/Syrah from Seeguret is about as good as they get!

Nieto Patrimonial Bonarda £17

We all know Argentina Malbec, here’s something a whole lot les ubiquitous but equally interesting to try… a bright nose of fresh cherries and toast over a dark palate of five spice, Christmas cake and dark chocolate with a long, rich finish.

Palacio del Camino Real Reserva, Rioja £18

After a lot of searching for a proper Rioja – bright notes on top of woody depths – at a non-stupid price, we found this one. Really. It’s that good.

SWEET AND FORTIFIED WINES

A sweet ending

We prefer to call ’em sweet wines rather than dessert wines because (1) they’re more versatile than just ‘pudding wine’ – some, generally the ones with greater acidity, make great aperitifs, there’s the obvious foie gras / chicken liver paté match up and they’re often fantastic with cheese.

And (2)… dessert wine? Isn’t that a bit nineteen seventies? A bit Abigail’s Party? A bit hostess trolley?

Port of Leith Pedro Ximenez £19

Literally – OK not literally – but literally tastes like liquidised Christmas cake… deep, dark and sweet in an oh-so-grown-up and sophisticated kind of way

Martha’s Reserve Tawny Port £18

Searching for port barrels in which to mature their whisky, when the guys from Port of Leith Distillery discovered this stuff, they couldn’t quite believe their taste-buds.

Méthode Ancestrale (Demi-Sec), Limoux £15

This is a delightful, delicately sweet sparkler ideal as accompaniment to lighter puddings – trifle, for example – but would also be great with a mince pie or slice of Christmas cake,