Easter Wine Pairing 2016 – Roast Lamb

Well it’s that time of year again for Easter egg hunts and consuming vast amounts of chocolate. I don’t know how everyone else feels, but for me Easter egg chocolate is just delicious and for some reason, tastes better than any other chocolate that is produced all year through.

At Enjoy Discovering Wine we have written an Easter blog for the past three years and they have all been based on pairing wine with chocolate or other sweet based treats such as Julie’s blog based on Mary Berry’s Simnel Cake.  So this year we have decided to base our Easter blog on something a little bit different and focus on the main course for the Easter lunch rather than the sweeter puddings.

Easter Wine Pairing – Roast Lamb – Easter Sunday Lunch

So what is on your menu this year for your family’s Easter Sunday lunch?

I would dare to guess that for most families this will be based around a good old fashioned Sunday roast, delicious succulent meat with crispy roast potatoes, lovely fresh vegetables and rich flavoursome gravy, yum.  This recipe from Mary Berry for slow roasted Lamb is looking extremely tempting the meat should be tender and falling from the bone and the gravy with the added meat juices and redcurrant jelly is going to be packed full of flavour, definitely worth a go I think.

Easter Wine Pairing – Roast Lamb – Wine to accompany this delicious dish

I think the key word for Mary’s roast lamb dish is flavour, her recipe is packed full of it so I am making this the main consideration when selecting  wine’s to pair with it.

My first thought for a red wine is a wine that I presented to Bournemouth Wine Society last night, Touriga Nacional from Portugal, a dry red wine with intense colour and flavour, full bodied with an extremely smooth texture.  As a large group of over 120 most of us felt that this wine ticked all the boxes and more, it did deliver on flavour and the tannins were high and matched with a level of acidity that made the wine come together perfectly.

Thinking towards a white wine which will pair well with the flavoursome lamb, Marks and Spencer’s Award winning Bourgogne Chardonnay looks very appealing, the grapes, which have been handpicked from vines up to 70 years old offer the concentrated flavours that we need, alongside this the wine has spent time aging in French oak to add further richness . All in all this wine should be able to stand up to the dish and has a very nice price tag of £9.00 per bottle.

Easter Wine Pairing – Roast Lamb written by Helen Evans, Enjoy Discovering Wine