Perfect Holiday Pairings

Turkey and trimmings have long taken centre stage at Christmas, but the wine is just as important

- Sarah Heller, MW

Holidays are about rituals: festive routines repeated year after year—so often we have long forgotten their origins. As a wine writer, one of my annual practices has been trying out novel takes on holiday food and wine pairing, itself a series of rituals with unfamiliar origins that can, with a little delving, begin to seem increasingly arbitrary.

A masterclass led by my fellow Master of Wine Tim Hanni, a man with a mile-wide contrarian streak, underlined this point. For one thing, what we consider “traditional pairing” is actually a fairly modern concept, even in France. For instance, the Larousse Gastronomique contained no food and wine pairing guidance until 1961 (hardly the hallowed days of old).