Wine
In advance of that though, can I make one special plea for a largely overlooked range of wine styles which, for relatively little outlay, can add a delightful extra dimension to your dinner table during the Christmas feasting — or indeed at any time of year?
Sweet wines are produced in quite a wide variety of ways — from interrupting fermentation by the addition of spirit, through to more arcane techniques including freezing and even, most wondrously of all, encouraging a vine disease, Botrytis, which desiccates the grape. With so many production methods, the end product wines are certainly not all the same. But there is a lot of convergence — the sugar obviously, often accompanied by a viscous density but always, crucially, offset by acidity.
