Hallowe’en Wine Pairings from Margaret Rand

What do you drink at Hallowe’en? What it is is much less important than what it looks like. Food has to be weird colours, with fake blood (even if it is only icing), fake eyeballs, fake skeletons; how can the wine compete?

I am not, by the way, going to worry too much about whether these wines will go with individual dishes. One of my suggestions will go with savoury dishes, the other with sweet ones. Job done.

For savoury dishes, orange wine can look suitably lurid. Not, to be honest, as bright as Aperol spritz, but definitely orange. Orange wine is made from white grapes, but instead of pressing the juice off the skins before fermentation, as you would for white wine, you leave the skins with the juice during fermentation. White grape skins have a bit of colour, and so you get a beautiful amber tint. You also get some tannic grip, which makes orange wines a good bet for lots of savoury dishes. Hallowe’en sausages? Tick. Potato eyeballs? Tick.

Most good supermarkets and independents will have at least one; they were originally a speciality of Georgia, Croatia and places that had never abandoned their millennia-old tradition of making wines in huge clay jars (called quevri in Georgia). But orange wines have become so popular that everywhere is making them now, including England. They will often also be labelled ‘natural wine’, a category which lacks a firm definition but which encompasses organic or biodynamic viticulture and no additives in the cellar, including the use of natural wild yeasts.

Or how about a black wine with green edges? Sounds fun? What’s more, it will go with whatever gruesomely decorated cakes you’re producing. Even the sweetest, most tooth-rotting desserts won’t faze it. It is Sherry made from the Pedro Ximenez grape, and that’s how it’s identified: as PX. It’s super-sweet, thick-textured, black as night, and when you tilt the glass you’ll see a thin greenish rim. It’s also delicious: raisiny, fresh, almost grassy. And if you can’t face those cakes you’ve made, just have it with vanilla ice cream.

There are a number on the market: Barbadillo, Gonzalez Byass, Osborne, Hidalgo and Valdespino all do one, and supermarkets often have own-label versions. It’s one of those sweet wines that manages not to be cloying: your Hallowe’en drinking could become a habit.

Margaret Rand is the longstanding editor of the Hugh Johnston’s Pocket Wine Book.