When it comes to food and wine pairing, Christmas can be a bit of a nightmare. So many different flavours and textures on one plate. Often we veer towards the classics. I’m suggesting you might like to try something a bit different!
Loire reds are a great choice for your Christmas turkey but on this occasion I’m recommending a Zweigelt from Austria.
This wine comes from an iconic estate in Austria. 17 generations of the Moser family have worked in wine including Dr Lenz Moser who introduced a new method of training vines that was widely adopted in Europe and other parts of the wine world.
Sepp Moser (Lenz’s son) founded his own vineyard in 1987 and today the estate is run by Nikolaus & Andrea Moser and their daughters Kathy & Mariana.
The family headquarters is located 70km west of Vienna in the village of Rohrendorf where the white grape variety Grüner Veltliner reigns (that’s a favourite of ours too) but this wine comes from Hedwighof in the area of Neusiedlersee/Burgenland. This is where the Zweigelt grape variety rules with 60% of plantings.
Zweigelt is light in weight and spicy with flavours of sour cherry, raspberry, violets and pepper. Tannins are moderate and the alcohol is reasonable at 13%. These kind of wines are brilliant with food.
The estate is organic and has worked biodynamically since 2000 (becoming fully certified in 2009). Part of the vineyard area is worked by horse, a flock of sheep graze up on the slopes and 30 hens living amongst the vines provide eggs for their organic farm shop.
This would be a fabulous Christmas wine so do look out for it or other Zweigelts in your local independent wine merchant.
