Wines for great Easter feasting
Domaine des Tourelles Cuvée Pierre Brun, Lebanon 2020, £14.99, or £11.99 as part of a mixed six, Majestic Easter feasting in the UK is rather less bound by family traditions than Christmas. There’s an echo of Christmas excess in settling down after lunch to watch a film with a haul of chocolate eggs and a glass of smoothly, darkly, sweetly comforting port (such as Graham’s Late Bottled Vintage, now on offer for £12 at Asda, and widely available). Another common theme is lamb, which, when roasted with rosemary, garlic and all the usual trimmings, is ideally matched to the softened dark fruit and savoury tones of a classic, mature bordeaux such as Asda Extra Special Château Le Bosq Médoc 2016 (currently £11.50, down from £14). For sweetly spicier, Levantine-style lamb, I’d go for the fine Lebanese producer Domaine des Tourelles’ darker, more robust and spicy red blend.
Karavitakis Kompsos Liatiko, Crete, Greece 2022, £10.95, The Wine Society I’d be tempted by a Lebanese wine for my own lamb-free Easter feast plans this year, an Ottolenghi-ish array of dishes that will include at least one element based on what Ottolenghi’s longtime collaborator Ixta Belfrage calls his ‘unbeatable formula’ of ‘flavoured yoghurt base plus roasted aubergines plus vibrant toppings’. The Lebanese choice could be a red such as the Domaine des Tourelles, but I’m increasingly smitten with the country’s distinctive and gastronomic whites. These tend to have a certain richness and power while retaining verve and flow, giving them the food-matching versatility you need for the variety of a meze-type meal. A wine such as the very special Ixsir Grande Reserve 2022 (from £25.50, vinum; greatwine.co.uk), a perfumed fleshy-peachy, citrus-pithy blend of viognier, sauvignon blanc and chardonnay, would be ideal. As would a red from another country with a meze tradition: Karavitakis’s take on the Cretan grape liatiko, with its food-friendly sweet-sour red-fruit tanginess.
Tbilvino Qvevris Saperavi, Kakheti, Georgia, 2021, £19.99, Laithwaites Georgia also has a rich culinary tradition of serving a feast of multiple dishes at times such as Easter (which, as in Orthodox Christian Greece, takes place on Sunday 5 May this year). I find that Georgian wines – red, white and orange – have that ability to sit comfortably with the array foods that characterise a Georgian supra. Many of my favourite Georgian bottles are made by fermenting and ageing the wines in the qvevri clay pots that have been used in the country for millennia, and have been taken up enthusiastically by winemakers all over the world who enjoy the earthy, spicy, and herbal flavours and intriguing textures claypot winemaking seems to bring. At Easter, I like the idea of drinking a wine made in the same way as those consumed in biblical times, and the vivid blackberry succulence and pleasingly grippy texture of Tbilvino’s saperavi red happen to be great with both roast lamb and vegetable meze.
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