There’s something a little perverse about the way Australians shoehorn European religious and cultural traditions into our summer. European Christmas is all about cold weather, warming food and rich drink; in the midst of a sweltering Australian summer, it’s hard to muster the appetite for anything heartier than a salad and an ice-cold lager.
Despite this, there’s something to be said for the joys of an Australian Christmas – especially its culinary joys. The country’s gradually weakening ties to the British empire mean our Christmases are no longer dominated by seasonally inappropriate roasts and boiled puddings with heavy custard; instead, we opt for lighter flavours and textures that reflect a certain nostalgia, tempered by practicality.
Australia’s love of a good drink means these hybrid dishes cry out for matching beverages. So rather than sticking to the usual suspects – crisp lagers, dry sparkling whites, and still whites and reds – why not match these unusual foods with some off-the-radar drinks?
1. Seafood and dry sherry
For many Australians, Christmas means seafood – preferably a heaped platter of cold cooked prawns, freshly shucked raw oysters and a smattering of Moreton Bay bugs or rock lobsters. Never mind that this year Australia will experience a shortage of oysters – for many of us, Christmas will still involve a trip to the fishmonger, even if oysters are off the menu.
While there are few culinary pleasures as true as oysters with chablis or scallops with a zippy champagne, it’s worth considering a dry sherry with your seafood this Christmas. If your mental image of sherry is a sticky brown substance found in mouldering bottles in grandmother’s sideboard, it’s time to reconsider. While sherry isn’t exactly hip, it’s definitely back, and the drier styles are leading the charge towards mainstream respectability.
The lucky inhabitants of Spain’s sherry triangle – the area just south of Seville from which the only wines that can be legally be labelled sherry originate – are blessed not only with proximity to one of the world’s great wine regions, but also with an abundance of seafood, and they’re more than happy to wash the latter down with the products of the former. Their rules are pretty simple: if it swims, serve it with a fino or a manzanilla sherry. These two closely related styles of sherry are fresh and vibrant even when they’ve been subjected to years of ageing, thanks to the veil of flor that protects the maturing wine from oxygenation. Their unusual salinity, leanness and striking minerality make them a perfect foil for seafood – especially prawns.
The great thing about acquiring a taste for slightly daggy wines is that their lack of prestige dramatically lowers prices, and reasonable entry-level fino and manzanilla sherries can be found for not much more than $25 per full bottle (these wines are commonly sold by the half bottle).
I have a soft spot for Hijos de Rainera Pérez Marín’s entry-level manzanilla, La Guita, which manages to pack a fair wallop of layered savouriness despite being made in gargantuan quantities – it’s one of Spain’s most popular sherries, and for good reason. A little further up the scale you’ll find Sánchez Romate’s Fino Perdido, which is bottled en rama (without filtration) and with a few more years of age on it than is strictly customary, which gives it a wonderfully dense texture.
If you’re a patriot who is after an Australian drop, it’s worth investigating the dry sherry-like wines of Seppeltsfield and Pennyweight, both of which stand in stark contrast to the cheap cruft that is the vast majority of Australian “sherry”. And if you have the money and the patience to track them down, it’s worth trying to find a bottle of either the Equipo Navazos La Bota de Florpower vino blanco or the Navazos-Niepoort vino blanco – both unfortified white wines from the sherry region that demonstrate the region’s potential for profound and layered fine wines.
Sticking with tradition?
If you’re going to buy champagne, do the right thing and steer your money away from the big houses and their huge marketing budgets, and instead invest in a grower champagne, which is bound to represent better value. Larmandier-Bernier, Laherte Frères, Egly-Ouriet and Piollot père et fils are all names to look out for. For Australian sparkling wines of the dry white variety, look no further than Tasmania, the cold climate of which echoes the severity of the French Champagne region. Go-to names include Arras, Frogmore Creek and Josef Chromy. And if you want to split the difference between bubbles and the funk of sherry, try to find a bottle of either of the two Colet-Navazos wines – a collaboration between Catalonian cava house Colet and sherry negociants Equipo Navazos that sees lean, zippy cava dosed with high-quality dry sherries.
2. Stonefruit salad and rosé
Christmas happens to coincide with the peak of Australia’s stone fruit season, which means an abundance of peaches and nectarines. These fruits, in either their white or yellow forms, just beg to be cubed and tossed with a handful of rocket, fresh mint, maybe some green beans, lightly toasted almonds, and olive oil and vinegar. If you’re after something a little more substantial, you can throw in some fresh bocconcini or a burrata cheese, too.
The pairing of rosé with this kind of salad goes beyond the Insta-worthy partnership of pale pink peach flesh with pale pink wine. The acidic dressing of salads can dominate a medium- or low-acid wine, but many rosés have the acidic backbone to stand up to it. A little hint of residual sugar, which many rosés possess, can also help tame the dressing. And the fruit-driven nature of rosé means it chimes beautifully with the fruit in the salad.
While there’s an ocean of indifferently made, easy-to-swill Provençal rosé out there – global sales of rosé are growing at a remarkable rate and production has boomed in the south of France – it’s still possible to find high-quality rosés that have a bit more heft and are perfect pairings for food. I’m rather fond of the Cuvée Tradition rosé made from tibouren grapes by Provençal producer Clos Cibonne – aged under a thin veil of yeast not unlike the flor that protects dry sherries, it balances orange peel and rose petal notes with a savouriness from the yeast and a herbaceous complexity.
If you’re looking for something made a little closer to home, consider one of the rosés made by Australia’s naturalist set. The 2017 vintage of Tom Shobbrook’s Poolside syrah straddles the line between an incredibly light red and a dark rosé, but wherever you place it in the taxonomy of wine, it’s an immensely likeable wine full of white pepper and juicy red fruit.
The coppery pinot gris made by Murrumbateman producer Ravensworth similarly blurs the line between a rosé and an orange wine, but the extended skin contact gives this gris some grip and a complexity that a watery pinot gris often sorely lacks. Finally, if you’re after a truly luxe rosé, try to get your hands on a bottle of one from the tiny Provençal appellation of Bandol. Both Domaine Tempier and Château de Pibarnon are standard-bearers for the region.
Sticking with tradition?
If you’re allergic to pink wine, or can’t stand the hashtag #roséallday, any high-acid white wine with clean-cut fruit flavours would pair well with this kind of salad. Albariño-based wines from Spain’s Rias Baixas have acid and fruit character in spades, and their notes of white peach and nectarine play well with the real deal in the salad bowl – look for examples from Bodegas Eidosela, Zarate or Forjas del Salnés. The green, herbaceous notes of an Austrian grüner veltliner will also find an echo in the herbs in the salad – producers of note include Emmerich Knoll, Ingrid Groiss and Rudi Pichler. For an Australian drop, look no further than a dry Clare Valley riesling – I’m particularly taken by the work being done at Rieslingfreak, while Grosset remains the benchmark producer.
3. Roast chicken, turkey, duck or goose with dry madeira
If sherry has something of an image problem, then madeira has a whole complex. This unusual fortified wine, produced only on the subtropical Portuguese island of Madeira, possesses intensely layered flavours, vibrant acidity and an incredibly rich history – but remains unfortunately neglected by most wine drinkers. Which is a real shame, because a good madeira can make an excellent food pairing, especially when matched with something opulent, like a traditional Christmas poultry roast. The lively acidity of the wine cuts through the fat of roast, while its rich, caramelised and nutty flavour – a byproduct of the estufagem process, in which the wine is deliberately heated and oxidised – pairs well with the similarly rich flavour of roasted meat.
Madeira’s labelling system does make it a little difficult to walk into a bottle shop and pick up the right style. Very young madeiras, made with the widely grown negra mole grape, are labelled in terms of their dryness – seco (dry), meio seco (medium dry), meio doce (medium sweet), or doce (sweet). Better, older madeiras, however, are made from one of the four traditional Madeiran grape varieties, and are labelled with that name: sercial (dry), verdelho (medium dry), bual (medium sweet), or malmsey (sweet).
The younger styles made from negra mole are fine for cooking with but aren’t exactly profound drinking experiences, so look for the named varietals when shopping. Sercial and verdelho madeiras are the best bet to go with your roast – save the buals and malmseys for after dinner. As far as producers go, I’m a fan of both Barbeito and D’Oliveras, although so little madeira makes it to Australia that you might not have the luxury of choice. If you’re after something very fancy, splurge on a medium-dry bottle of the nearly extinct terrantez varietal, most examples of which have some serious cellar age on them. (The estufagem process makes madeira practically indestructible, which means that very old madeiras – some can be found that are well over a century old – are still drinking remarkably well today.)
Sticking with tradition?
If madeira with dinner sounds like a bridge too far, go for a rich, textural white wine with acidity and structure to pair with your roast bird. The chardonnay-based white wines of Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune, particularly those of Domaine Leflaive, are the paradigm, but are frighteningly expensive. For something approaching the texture of white burgundy on a budget, look to the godello grape grown in the Spanish province of Galicia, particularly examples from the Valdeorras, Monterrei, and Ribeiro wine areas. A Hunter Valley semillon with some serious cellar age on it – at least five years, preferably 10 – would also work wonders: look for examples from Mount Pleasant or Tyrrell’s.
4. Cold glazed ham with sparkling shiraz
No Christmas dish could be less suited to Australia’s summer climate than a glazed ham, but that small impediment hasn’t made a dent in its popularity as the centrepiece of Australian Christmas lunches and dinners. (Fortunately, practicality dictates that it is more often than not served cold.) A Christmas ham has big, bold flavours that could easily overpower the lighter styles of red wine that respond best to being chilled, which makes wine matching cold ham something of a challenge.
Enter sparkling shiraz. There’s something terminally daggy about the entire concept – a rich, decadent Australian shiraz that has undergone secondary fermentation in the traditional champenoise method. But these wines are loved by Australian wine anoraks for a reason – the best examples match gutsy fruit character and grippy tannin with the elegance of good champagne. They’re also a uniquely Australian product – while other parts of the world make lightlysparkling red wines (think Italian lambrusco or brachetto), nobody else matches the hulking weight of warm-climate shiraz with full-throated bubbles.
Seppelt’s high-end (and relatively expensive) Show Sparkling is the true original of the style, but even the winemaker’s much cheaper entry-level sparkling shiraz remains delicious. Best’s Great Western is dosed with a touch of sweet muscat, which gives it a suitably Christmassy hint of raisins and spice. If you have a bit of money to spend, the Joseph sparkling red blend (with some merlot and cabernet sauvignon in the mix) from Primo Estate and Leasingham’s Classic Clare both vie for the title of Australia’s best red fizz. For something a little different, try Sassafras’s sparkling red, made from the Italian montepulciano varietal and made fizzy by the ancient ancestrale method.
Sticking with tradition?
Look for a medium-bodied red wine that can take some chill but still has tannic grip to work with the fat and protein of the glazed ham. A young, fruit-driven Spanish tempranillo such as Olivier Rivière’s Rayos Uva rioja or Palacios Remondo’s La Vendimia rioja would work here, or a pineau d’aunis such as Patrice Colin’s coteaux du vendômois. For something closer to home, try Bobar’s Gamma Ray red blend – 75% fruity gamay with 25% cabernet franc for tannin and a hint of herbaceousness.
