Festive favourites

They’ve won awards aplenty, but are eastern european wines really fit for the Christmas table? Our wine columnist Adam Lechmere thinks so...

Whenever you went to Labour party meetings in the 1980s, the wine on offer was usually Bulgarian red. It was cheap, but definitely not cheerful, which was fine, because you were supposed to be morose if you were Labour in the dark days of Thatcherism. I can taste it now, with its sour palate and grainy,dry tannins that induced 12-hour headaches if you drank enough. Things are much different now. The Labour party had 12 years in power to cheer it up and, even more importantly, wine producers in the former Soviet republics have had a generation in which to forget the miseries of collectivisation.

The wine appearing from Georgia, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Slovakia and their neighbours, now bears as much relation to the stuff we drank at those homely Eighties get-togethers as Tony Blair does to Michael Foot.

During the communist era the emphasis was on quantity at the expense of quality; millions of litres of gluggable wine were produced by cooperatives, with no concept of reducing yields to concentrate on quality. Now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, winemakers, many returning from stints with New World and western European producers, benefit from increased knowledge and investment, often foreign.

Bulgaria has benefited hugely from the international spotlight. Prominent figures in Bordeaux like the globetrotting consultant Michel Rolland, and Stephan Von Neipperg of Château Canon la Gaffelière in St Emilion, have big interests there. Unfortunately many of the wines have become rather too slick; identikit fruit-forward reds, indistinguishable from the cabernets and pinots churned out in bulk from Chile to Australia. Hungary is streets ahead in terms of its investment and development. As well as its renowned sweet tokaji, there are some wonderful dry wines – such as the Verus Furmint, with its mouthwatering acids and its honeyed, almond flavours.

The great frustration is that so many of these wines are hard to find. But if you’re prepared to shop around, you can get your hands on wines that will have your Christmas guests clamouring for more. The Orovela Saperavi from Georgia, for example, is a superb, spicy, smoky red. It might be a bit rich for the turkey but try it with other Christmas favourites like strong spiced beef.

Where it really gets interesting is with countries like Slovenia. On the Italian border, high up by Friuli, the Slovenians produce extraordinary oxidised white wines, but in the less fashionable eastern regions you find the sublime sweet wines. See if you can get hold of the Simcic Leonardo (see below). It’s a tour-de-force, and was awarded a trophy at the Decanter World Wine Awards this year for its marmalade, walnut and ‘figgy latte’ aromas and sweet sultanas and dates on the palate.

Fabulous – and if you don’t find that the perfect match for Christmas pudding, I’ll eat my copy of the 1983 Labour manifesto.