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Suddenly, with no warning, it appears to be only a few weeks until Christmas. How has that happened? I’ve only just packed away my summer clothes and I’m having to imagine what would taste good with Christmas pudding. As with the rest of the wines for Christmas, we’re not just taking into account a straight food and wine match, but the whole day and how you’ll be feeling by pudding time. We still have last year’s Christmas pudding in the pantry. It’s best before March 2008 and in December 2006 we just couldn’t face it.
We tasted a range of different sticky wines and the absolute best, by a long way, was Buller’s Fine Old Muscat, which is £9.99 from Majestic. The taste is absolutely like Christmas pudding, with the alcohol cutting through the gagging sweetness. It smells of barley sugars and tastes like the syrup in tinned prunes. We felt it was resoundingly perfect for the job, but will you be fit for it? We fell into the trap last year of postponing the actual pudding eating again and again, deciding that we’d definitely feel like it by Boxing Day and here we are in November and we still haven’t got round to it.
While the rich, sticky, dark Muscat does seem perfect in its similarity, perhaps something a little cleaner would be better. St Amandus Beerenauslese, which is a very attractive £3.99 from Aldi, for a tall, thin 50cl bottle, is just such a wine. It smells very attractively of vintage marmalade and botrytis, which is the mould that grows on some grapes and makes the water evaporate, leaving richer juice. The taste is most definitely sweet, but also freshly clean. Nikki was reminded of elderflowers. I feel that after slogging your way through all those trimmings you may feel rather relieved to be drinking something so lively.
Another option would be to pair it with something salty. I’m a great fan of the salt/sweet combination and cream sherry has both. Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Gran Reserva Cream Sherry is £9.99, but reduced to £4.99 until 20th November (now extended). It smells salty and malty and is definitely sweet, but also savoury, to cut through the rich pudding. It’s also in a beautifully-shaped bottle, which will look great on the table.
Sauternes might be the answer, but I think it lacks acidity and would be just one spoonful too sweet. We tried Port, which we found just too spirity and all wrong. Moscato d’Asti is often submitted to me to go with Christmas pudding, and I can see that the bubbles do nicely cut through the sweetness and are quite refreshing, but it doesn’t add anything to the equation, for me.
We’ve also tasted a couple of chocolate flavoured red fortified wines. M&S sell one called chocolate ruby. It smells and tastes rather like Baileys, without the cream, but it would be quite vile with Christmas pudding. We slightly preferred Rubis, which you can track down online. It’s chocolatey, without being quite so caramel-scented. Both would be great for granny, after dinner.