Passive-aggressive wine strategies

It's Christmas! Here's how to be a bad wine host

Alastair Sims as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1951)

In Salman Rushdie’s 'Midnight’s Children’, the protagonist Saleem remembers his aunts communicating via the foods they served people. Being experts at “the impregnation of food with emotions”, they prepared Biryanis of Dissention and Koftas of Discord for their families and guests on occasions when words of dissent and discordance were not permitted.

Christmas gatherings are one such occasion. Uncle Peter is coming with that dreadful second wife, awkward twenty-something boyfriends/girlfriends show up whom you’re unsure whether to invest in, irritatingly-carefree neighbours pop round having spent all day making choux pastry (thank god for the new steam oven).

The fact is that not a single British person actually likes a perfect host. We will be impressed, on some level. But we will also ultimately feel both sorry for, and slightly envious of, the value you have placed on an activity that involves so much preparation, and so much washing up. The perfect British host is someone who sends you a typo-strewn WhatsApp 24 hours before the event, orders a pallet of mid-priced booze, makes a token cooking effort (slightly burnt cheese straws?), and hasn’t cleaned the house too well.

Wine media misses a trick, then in being awash with strategies to impress at Christmas. Here are my tips for using wine to get people out of your house, avoid being invited back to things, or just simply to have a ooh-so-satisfying little dig.

1. Go massively overboard

If you’re serious about wine, you might think that plying people with weird/undrinkable wine will annoy them. It might. Or, it might reassure them of the very thing they want to believe about you - that you’re a wine snob with weird, angular tastes and that fine wine is all a hoax.

The alternative strategy, then, is to serve absolute bangers.

Bring that magnum of prestige champagne around to the haughty neighbours, pop it ostentatiously and watch the other guests coo as they drift away from the Scandi-designed punch bowl and mid-priced Rioja. Insist, to anyone who says it’s all wasted on me, that they take a full glass - and when they ask you about it out of politeness, refuse to tell them anything about it. You’re not a wine bore, you see. Just a humble enthusiast. Enjoy it.

Christmas show-offs love generosity and false humility, but only when they can dish it out and claim the credit. Upstage them.

2. Pick wines that channel negative energy

If you want to take a more classic approach with people you hold a grudge towards, head for wines that taste like they have a bit of a grudge to bear themselves. Sagrantino from Umbria in Italy is a fine choice; as the world’s most tannic grape variety, I’ve seen its wines described as an iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove. Getting smacked around the palate by an iron fist feels pretty similar whether there’s a velvet glove on it or not, though.

Mid-level Loire reds from producers trying to be slightly natural and edgy also have a tinge of resentment about them (you know, the sort of weedy, chewy little Cab Francs that taste like they’re made by slightly bitter people). Pinots, from just about anywhere, swamped with whole-bunch-fermention stemminess work, too, as do astringent, self-consciously light Grenaches made by people who wished they lived in places cool enough to make Pinot Noirs swamped with whole-bunch-fermentation stemminess.

3. Do not have any other drinks in the house

The ultimate act of rebellion for anyone that harbours a secret resentment toward your wine connoisseurship is to ask for a beer. You know the type: you tell them, casually, what’s on offer; “I’ve got a lovely snappy South African Sauvignon, some nice Champagne (nothing fancy), a light Dolcetto for reds or some Priorat if you want something bigger…”…at which point, after a few seconds of silence, you drift into the obligatory list of other available drinks. In Britain this means warm cans of Brewdog, a stewed, bitter, awful mulled concoction sweating away on the hob, and a DIY gin and tonic station.

Do not have any of these things. Only have wine. Apologise with some lame excuse - the supermarket delivery substituted the Brewdog for Heineken and you refused it, or you read that mulled wine is profoundly carcinogenic. Your real friends will stay, even if they don’t like the wine. The rest will leave.

4. The last resort - dessert wine

There are a number of tried-and-tested ways to signal The End Of The Night. These include scraping food into a bin, loading a dishwasher, gently scrubbing at stains on a table or turning the music down to an awkwardly-quiet level. For wine lovers, though, the nuclear option is an easy one: sweet wine. British adults that actually consume Haribo, or chocolate cereal, or Dr Pepper, will still look at a bottle of dessert wine in unalloyed horror.

Opening a dessert wine is a huge, flashing red light saying THIS IS THE END OF THE EVENING. Choose something very, very good and probably rather old, slightly nervy (port is too friendly), and make sure there are no alternatives left. Germany and Alsace late harvest wines come in handy here because the bottles are very, very small and don’t last long - a miniscule drop of aged TBA (trockenbeerenauslese) Riesling will delight wine fans and slightly annoy everyone else.

And…relax

And there we have it. Sorry if that was a bit Scroogey, but Christmas is a time, after all, when we want to spend as much time as possible with people we like and as little as possible with everyone else. A time when, despite the obligation to remain cordial and diplomatic at all times, many of us still have to find our channels of inner resistance.

*and I’m not just saying that because they read this Substack