Château Musar, Bekaa Valley, Lebanon 2018 (from £36, thewinesociety.com; Waitrose) When it comes to choosing wines to splash out on as a gift for a wine lover or as a spectacular treat to elevate your Christmas dinner, the European classics tend to come top of the list. For no-expense-spared red wines, that might mean a gorgeously ready-to-drink topflight Bordeaux such as Château d’Issan, Margaux 2012 (£65, hedonism.co.uk), a suave-textured, intensely flavoured Rioja such as CVNE Imperial Gran Reserva 2017 (from £50, hic-winemerchants.co.uk; thewinesociety.com); a nuanced, silky, peppered-meaty northern Rhône Syrah, such as Domaine Georges Vernay Blonde du Seigneur Côte-Rôtie 2021 (£69.95, yapp.co.uk); or the luxurious cherries, strawberries, oregano and tobacco found in a top-table Tuscan such as Capanna Brunello di Montalcino 2018 (£58.50, thegoodwineshop.co.uk). This year, however, I wonder if a classic and no-less hedonistic wine from another part of the wine world might send out a much-needed seasonal message of peace and goodwill at the festive table or under the tree: the multilayered, sweetly spiced, ethereally-long-finishing Lebanese red of Château Musar.
Zuccardi Concreto Malbec, Uco Valley, Argentina 2021 (from £29, laithwaites.co.uk; fieldandfawcett.co.uk; farehamwinecellar.co.uk) Staying in Christmas-treat territory but taking a step-or-two down from the pricing peaks of trad’ European fine wine, the £20 to £30 price range is where I reckon you can find bottles with the highest pleasure-per-pound ratio around right now – a place filled with high-spec wines that have yet to see their prices fully inflated by reputation. They can come from anywhere in the world, but a list of some of the red wines I’ve been eyeing up for my own Christmas list and menu includes a trio from the southern hemisphere: a prime example of the graceful progress made by top malbec producers in the high-altitude Andean vineyards of Argentina’s Uco Valley, in the shape of the elegantly plump and perfumed Zuccardi Concreto; a seamlessly silky Cape answer to St-Emillion, Keermont Merlot, Stellenbosch, South Africa 2020 (£28, swig.co.uk); and a rich, spicy, succulent shiraz-based Barossa Valley red from one of Australia’s most celebrated producers: Henschke Henry’s Seven 2022 (£29, Booths).
Derthona La Colombera Timorasso, Colli Tortonese, Piedmont, Italy 2022 (£26.50, leaandsandeman.co.uk) The £20-to-£30 band is no less well stocked with white wines, and on Christmas Day I would be very happy to unwrap or serve a bottle of Elisa Semino’s take on the timorasso grape from Piedmont in northwest Italy, a wine with an entirely delightful mixture of fluent, cool-stream freshness, subtle herbiness and richer stone-fruit fleshiness. Another candidate for an upmarket white (wine) Christmas is Smith & Sheth Heretaunga Chardonnay, Hawke’s Bay 2019 (£28.99, waitrosecellar.com), which is richly nutty-creamy, but luminously balanced and drinkable, and further proof that New Zealand’s winemakers may actually be better at working with chardonnay than the sauvignon that dominates the country’s production. If your Christmas chardonnay has to be from its original home in Burgundy, a classical option comes in the shape of the pristine, electric-charged William Fèvre Chablis 2022 (from £27, laywheeler.com; bbr.com), while Gaia Estate Wild Ferment Assyrtiko, Santorini, Greece 2022 (from £32.49, haywines.co.uk; nywines.co.uk) is an exhilaratingly smoky and lemon-pithy Christmas star.
