The best wines to complement your holiday meals

The holiday season is a time filled with parties, get-togethers and celebrations with friends and family. For most of these events, food and drink is to be expected. Since we’re situated in one of the best wine regions in the world, we couldn’t recommend wine enough for a perfect addition to a great dinner.

With so many wine variations on the market today, however, it’s hard to know which wine is most suitable for different types of food. Red or white? Rosé or sparkling? Luckily, we’re here to help -we have the proper wine type lined up for each dinner course. Read on to discover them and get ready to wow your guests at your upcoming holiday party.

Appetizers

A plate of salty appetizers is great to offer before the main meal and a glass of champagne is the perfect accompaniment to that. From a plate of brie cheese to roasted nuts and prosciutto, a refreshing champagne works perfectly for any light canape you serve at your party. Another great appetizer-wine pairing? Flavourful sherry!

“Many sherry wines have nutty aromas, including hazelnut, almond and walnut. As a result, almonds and sherry- particularly a light, chilled Fino or Manzanilla- make for a simple and flavourful appetizer-and-sherry pairing,” the experts at Drink Focus confirm. While sherry isn’t typically served with the main course, this fortified wine goes beautifully with light ho’rs d’oeuvres.

Main Course

A traditional holiday dinner usually features at least one type of meat, and your wine selection will depend directly on the type of meat you serve. If you choose a dark meat, go for a dark red wine like Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec or Pinot Noir. If you plan to serve white meats such as chicken or turkey, stick to a white like Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc to experience a great taste combo. A fruity Sauvignon Blanc will also mesh great with a seafood dish while a lighter-bodied Pinot Noir will pair perfectly with duck.

No matter which meat you serve, there will always be a host of delectable wines for you to choose from to guarantee a tasty meal.

Dessert

Wine is often overlooked by the time the dessert course comes around, but it can make all the different in the world for your taste buds. “Sweet (dessert) wine is produced with extra sweet wine grapes. In order to make them sweet, the fermentation is stopped before the yeast turns all the natural grape sugar into alcohol,” wine enthusiasts Wine Folly explain. “There are several ways to stop the fermentation, including super-cooling or adding brandy to wine. Both methods create an environment where yeast won’t survive. While there are hundreds of different types of dessert wines available in the market, most fall into five main styles.”

These five styles include sparkling, lightly sweet and richly sweet dessert wine, as well as sweet red wine and fortified port wine. Port wine, which is made exclusively in Portugal, is a popular choice when eating chocolate-based desserts as it’s sweet, rich and contains similar flavours to chocolate, caramel and cinnamon. You can’t go wrong with Moscato or Riesling for fruity desserts, and a dessert wine like Gewurztraminer and sparkling Rosé is fool-proof if you’re looking for a drink that will please all of your guests.