(Decanter) - From choosing the perfect wines to dealing with novelty wine gifts, and how best to dispose of bottles come recycling day, the traditional English Christmas poses a number of potential pitfalls for the wine lover. Charles Jennings and Paul Keers share their idiosyncratic view.

Buying and pairing

Buying wine for your Christmas dinner should be a treat, an ideal opportunity to indulge both your knowledge and your generosity. If only your family were as appreciative as your wine merchant…

Unfortunately, your favourite high street cave is suddenly rammed with customers who last encountered a Merchant on the credits of a film with Mr Ivory. It’s impossible to enjoy the most important bottle shopping trip of your year because the sales assistants are monopolised by all of these first-time buyers.

Presuming you come away with a few choice bottles, or have cherrypicked a selection from the cellar, now you have to deal with the Christmas dinner – which, of course, is an impossible meal for matching. Forget about pairing with the turkey; your carefully chosen wine will be trying to hold its own against a cranberry sauce that attacks your palate like jam, and a bread sauce that smothers every other flavour with the blandness of wallpaper paste. It’s all right for Cliff Richard – he just pairs his wine with mistletoe.

So pragmatists simply match the wine to the occasion, and go traditional: a nice old Burgundy or Bordeaux. After all, when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he didn’t envisage a Christmas Yet To Come involving wine from countries populated by either separatists or convicts.

And not to forget, crucially, a bottle of Pol Roger to start proceedings. When you tell everyone it was Churchill’s favorite Champagne, that will give you an opportunity for plenty of quips regarding the day’s battles ahead. With perhaps a glass held back for a nightcap when it’s all over. As Winston said, in victory you deserve it – in defeat, you need it. PK

Serving

It’s all going horribly wrong. You’re heading into the main course, but Auntie Janet is still drinking the Chablis you served with the starter, and doesn’t want to move on to red. And Grandma has asked whether that nice yellow wine over on the sideboard is the one she had with pudding last year and if so, could she have some now because it was so lovely and sweet? (Well yes, that’s one way of describing Suduiraut…)

Serving the red wine in decanters means that, sadly, the guests will not see the provenance of your grand cru classé. Don’t worry; the label would have been of little interest to them as it doesn’t feature conversational topics like animals or supposedly entertaining puns. And someone would only have upset you by remarking that ‘1989 is a bit old, isn’t it? Don’t you have something fresher?’

However, it does mean that all of the said Bordeaux in decanter number one can be kept within arm’s reach – your arm’s reach – and served only to those who would really appreciate it. Primarily yourself. The teenagers and hoi polloi are drinking Good Ordinary Claret from other decanters planted further down the table.