Drink
GRAPE EXPECTATIONS
What do you buy a wine-lover for Christmas? Oddly, wine itself may not be the best choice. Its recipient may feel constrained – socially compelled, in fact – to open and share it, which is not the point at all. There is always plenty of booze sloshing around at Christmas, and your carefully chosen bottle will simply vanish into the communal trough, to be polished off by a seasonally tolerated distant relative who would be perfectly happy getting pie-eyed on sweet sherry or a six-pack of Tennent's Super.
If you must buy wine, make sure it is a young red wine from an excellent vintage, and point out (with a seasonal resonance) that it would be akin to slaughtering the Little Baby Jesus in his crib to drink it so early in its life. To make life easier, Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhône all produced excellent reds in 2015, so choose one of those and your gift can slumber contentedly in a cellar for a few years.
A good corkscrew will last even longer, however: to my mind, nobody has ever improved on the ‘waiter's friend' design, and the swankiest of these are handmade in Laguiole, in the South of France. The Forge de Laguiole Sommelier range (from £150) can be found at Farrar & Tanner (www.farrar-tanner.co.uk); the Laguiole en Aubrac range (from £124.95) is available from Wineware (www.wineware. co.uk); it also offers a rosewood-handled Champagne sabre (£154.95) for those of a dramatic disposition. Caveat emptor.
Wineware also sells various versions of Le Nez du Vin, a tool widely used by wine professionals but also great fun at home. It consists of little bottles of aromas commonly found in wine: grapefruit, lychee, honey, cedar, hay, coffee, to name but a few – and illustrated cards to match; prices start at £67 for a 12-aroma red or white wine kit, rising to £245 for the full-on 54-aroma kit. There are versions dedicated to coffee and whisky, too, and even one for wine faults: aromas include glue, rotten egg, cauliflower and horse. Sometimes, it really is better to give than to receive.
As I discovered when judging entries for the Louis Roederer International Wine Writer of the Year last year, there are more books published about wine nowadays than you can shake a Champagne sabre at. Few will stand the test of time: Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson's magisterial The World Atlas of Wine (Mitchell Beazley £40), however, first published in 1971, is in its seventh edition and is the reference book I use more than any other. No wine-lover should be without it.
For anyone who wants to understand the complex relationship between food and wine, Victoria Moore's splendidly witty The Wine Dine Dictionary (Granta Books £20) is a perfect gift, combining a lucid approach to the mechanics of flavour with recommendations that work both ways: wines she esteems with particular foods, and – should you have a special wine in the fridge or the cellar – the best food to eat with it.
Perhaps the best Christmas present, though, costs £40 and will guarantee its grateful recipient a lifetime of vinous pleasure. That is the price of joining the Wine Society (www.thewinesociety.com), and half the cost is refundable against the first purchase. I read recently that the under-25s don't drink any more, so it would make a joyously subversive gift for a grandchild.