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.

Being a good host is all very commendable. But what happens when, like Aunt Alia, you want to communicate dissent, or discord - but with wine? Luckily my own family is small enough, and simple enough, that I don’t have to deal with the sort of domestic conundrums that we so often hear about over the holiday period*; uncle Peter is coming with that dreadful second wife, and he has to be out before Laura arrives. Awkward twenty-something boyfriends/girlfriends show up, who you try very hard to like but probably never will. Those impossibly carefree neighbours pop round after they invited you to their little get-together (which involved them having spent all day making chou pastry -thank god for the new steam oven).

The fact is that not a single person - or at least a single British person - actually likes a perfect host. We will be impressed, on some level. We will be thankful and polite. But we will also ultimately feel both sad 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 less than 24hrs before the event, orders a pallet of mid-priced booze, makes a token cooking effort (slightly burnt cheese straws?), keeps the crisp bowl topped up and hasn’t cleaned the house too well.

Wine media misses a trick, then in being awash with strategies to impress at Christmas. We need a more flexible toolkit. Here, then, are my tips for using wine to get people out of your house, not get 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 them absolute bangers.

Bring that magnum of prestige champagne around to the haughty neighbours, especially if none of them like wine. Pop it ostentatiously, and watch the other guests coo as they slide away from the Scandi-designed punch bowl and mid-priced rioja. Insist, to that grisly, gin-drinking, Farage-dabbling relative who claims it’s all wasted on me, that they take a full glass of that first growth Bordeaux - 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.

These kind of people like 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 and varieties that taste like they have a bit of a grudge to bear themselves. Open them a bit young, serve them a bit cold. These can be wines that you, as a wine geek, really enjoy, but that others find really, really hard work.

Sagrantino from Umbria in Italy is a good choice for reds because it’s the world’s most tannic grape variety. I’ve seen its wines described as an iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove, but the truth is that getting smacked around the palate by an iron fist is going to feel pretty similar whether there’s a velvet glove on it or not. All that plummy, jammy fruit promises friendship, but the back end delivers unmistakable hostility.

Mid-level Loire reds from producers trying to be slightly natural and edgy also have a tinge of resentment about them. Weedy, chewy little Cab Francs that taste like they’re made by slightly bitter people. Pinots, from just about anywhere, swamped with whole-bunch-ferment stemminess work, too, as do astringent Grenaches made by people in hot places that wish they could make Pinot Noir. Carignan and Cinsault can work, but they don’t think of themselves quite so highly so somehow get away with it.

As a modern wine lover or professional, you spend so much time with this sort of wine that you can happily drink them (and you may have even convinced yourself that you like them). To the Casillero del Diablo crowd, though, they are pokey, enervating little messages in a bottle. Dish them out where necessary.

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 some 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 eat Haribo, or chocolate cereal, or drink Dr Pepper, will still look at a bottle of dessert wine in horror.

The fact remains, though, that opening a dessert wine is a huge, flashing red light saying THIS IS THE END OF THE EVENING. You can even combine it with the other strategies here if the message isn’t getting through; choose something very, very good and probably rather old, slightly nervy (port is too friendly), and make sure there are no alternatives. 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.

I’m actually really looking forward to it.

(P.S. I know I said in my last post that we’d be back on the wine geekery this week - my week got torpedoed by an ill four year old that meant I had to cancel my trip to Spain approximately three minutes before walking through security at Gatwick airport, and I’m still catching up…After the Champagne focus the last two weeks I’ve got an England special coming after a detailed chat with Mary Bridges at Gusbourne and a comprehensive look at what’s going on in the Crouch Valley. Stay tuned)

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