Victoria Moore has the perfect red wines to go with roast lamb

Your centrepiece dish deserves the best bottle, so let the experts lead the way

My best ever lamb lunch was one I didn’t even see, let alone eat. A friend had asked her husband to pick some rosemary – “of course you know what it is, the plant with purple flowers by the back door” – to put on the lamb. She later opened the Aga to a rush of floral aromatics and found the lamb leg strewn with branches of lavender. That lamb with lavender is actually pretty good didn’t quench her fury. How I long to be sitting now in their sunny courtyard, pouring a glass of rosé and listening to them shout at each other.

Lamb forms the centrepiece of the traditional family Easter lunch or dinner and it’s a meat that is more often cooked through the spring and summer. The thought of it marinating in garlic and rosemary or basted in yogurt and sizzling under a hot grill makes me look forward to the more sociable times I hope we will all soon have. It also makes me start to plan my drinking, because lamb goes brilliantly with many wines. So good is it that while researching my food-andwine matching guide, The Wine Dine Dictionary, I had to ration the number of times I allowed winemakers to mention butterflied leg of lamb as the best food to eat with their bottles.

Cabernet sauvignon is a classic lamb match, although it might be more accurate to phrase that the other way around and say that lamb is a classic pairing for cabernet sauvignon. What’s the difference? Lamb can make certain cabernet sauvignons taste better. Imagine you have an inexpensive, lean cabernet-based claret. Perhaps it tastes slightly dusty. Eat a mouthful of lamb chop cooked with a herb crust and the dustiness disappears: the wine tastes more fruity and ample.

Cabernet sauvignon doesn’t need to be dusty to work: all incarnations of the grape from richer, juicier versions from, say, Margaret River in Australia or Stellenbosch in South Africa, to stately, architectural incarnations from the Médoc in Bordeaux seem to sing with lamb’s rosemary-like meatiness.

Talking to Michael Karam, the Lebanese wine writer and author of Arak and Mezze: The Taste of Lebanon made me hungry not just for the sort of feasts I have enjoyed outdoors in the bright sunshine of the Bekaa Valley, but also for the chatter of many people around a table. “We Lebanese love lamb, mostly grilled, sometimes roasted and increasingly paired with our fruit-drenched, high-altitude sunshine wines,” says Karam, who now lives in Brighton.

“But lamb also puts in a decent shift as kibbeh nayeh, the herb-infused, raw meat purée, served as part of the mezze and eaten with onions, fresh mint and a drizzle of olive oil, washed down with arak, the aniseed-based eau de vie that is our national drink. The two combine to create the gustatory peak of our dining experience; I miss them terribly.”

Lamb also takes me to Greece where I have enjoyed it, grilled or barbecued, at a table heaving with mezze and with plenty of xinomavro in my glass. Xinomavro (“zeeno-mavro”) is a glorious Greek grape that tastes like a cross between pinot noir and nebbiolo. One to try? Apostolos Thymiopoulos Naoussa Alta 2017 Greece (12.5%, Theatre of Wine, £18.90) is beautifully elegant. Ktima Foundi Xinomavro 2016 Naoussa Greece (13%, the Wine Society, £14.95) is gruffer, more grainily tannic, with flavours of sun-dried tomato.

Jason Yapp, of Yapp Brothers, is a great aficionado of cabernet franc with pink lamb: “I’ve been hard-wired to that for as long as I can remember, it’s a winning combination, though I really don’t like cabernet franc at ambient temperature – it needs to be cooler.” Try Yapp’s Domaine Filliatreau Château Fouquet Rouge 2018 Saumur France (14%, Yapp. co.uk, £15.25) which is quite plush as it’s from a warm vintage.

Naturally, a gourmet like Jason has a few other ideas, too. Like me, he enjoys lamb as it is cooked in the south of France, perhaps with black olives, garlic, tomatoes, herbs, courgettes and aubergines. Before we speak, he starts emailing me ratatouille and lamb boulangère recipes as “background reading”. The boulangère, he reminds me, is so-called because the big metal tray of lamb and sliced potatoes would have been dropped in at the village boulangerie on the way to church, cooked in the baker’s oven and repatriated in the afternoon. It is, he says, one of his defaults at Easter (the recipe, which does not need a baker’s oven, can be found on the Yapp.co.uk blog filed in March 2019).

In warmer weather I love a glass of rosé before, during and after this sort of food. It also goes well with wines from the Rhône, Provence and Languedoc in which Yapp specialises. “What I would say with ratatouille is you want wine that has that savoury, almost herbal, briary quality,” Jason says. “Which would lead you to Corsica, Bellet or Bandol.” He also name-checked Domaine Richeaume Cuvée Tradition (14%, Yapp. co.uk, £19.50), a blend of cabernet sauvignon, syrah, merlot, grenache and tempranillo.

Slow-cooked styles of lamb can work well with Spanish reds: think of a shoulder of lamb, so unctuous it can be pulled apart with a fork, with a mature rioja or priorat, or a garlicky leg of lamb with couscous and a young ribera del duero.

I asked Telegraph columnist and cook Claire Thomson what she would pair with one of the recipes in her glorious Home Cookery Year (Quadrille, £30). Thomson helps to put together and write the wine list at the Gurnard’s Head in Cornwall and has a fine feeling for wine as well as the sort of food you want to cook at home for family meals.

With her butterflied leg of lamb with green olives, parsley, tzatziki and flatbreads she suggested Karavitakis Klima Red from Crete (13.5%, strictlywine.co.uk sells a different vintage to the one Claire has tasted, at £16.69) or the Denis Bardon bag in box NV Vin de France (11.5%, morewine.co.uk, £61.50 for a five-litre box).

One last thought: if you have a rosé itch but feel it’s too early/cold for the very pale ones from France, then try a fuller-flavoured pink such as a favourite of mine from the Lebanon: Domaine des Tourelles Rosé 2019 (13%) is available from a range of independents including Hennings Wine and Flagship Wines, for £11.50 to £12.95.