Wines to Welcome in 2025

By Erin Brown
Related Categories: Cookbook Confidential

What are you pouring on New Year’s Eve? Margaret Rand, editor of Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book 2025, gives her best suggestions.

The thing about New Year’s Eve is that it goes on for so long. Hours and hours. You’ve had dinner, and it’s still only half-past ten. What to do?

What you want is a steady state of gentle bonhomie that never tips over into either dehydration and irritation, or drowsiness. This is why charades was invented: it involves testing your balance and speech and general attentiveness, while giving plenty of time for gentle top-ups.

But of what? During dinner and afterwards you’ll want something celebratory. Space here does not permit a wine match for every conceivable NYE dish, so I shall suggest one of my 10 Wines to Try in 2025, from the current edition of the Pocket Wine Book: red Caballo Loco from Valdivieso in Chile. It will go with pretty well everything from chicken to goose to beef to venison; I’ve even had it with tuna, and it worked, because the tannins are so supple. It’s fresh, rich and alive. I defy anyone not to love it.

If you want white, and you will, one of my current favourite grapes is Carricante from Etna, on Sicily. It’s a wonderful grape: tense and lemony in youth, and maturing to flavours of honey and fennel. Try Pietrodolce’s Archineri: it’s another of my 10 Wines. And if you buy more than you need, tuck it away. It will repay the extra age.

Should you serve Port after dinner on NYE? Certainly: nothing goes better with cheese. Besides, these wines are tremendously good value. Try a single-quinta Vintage Port – they need much less ageing than classic Vintage Port, but they’re made with the same care, and usually from vineyards that are the key component of that producer’s classic Vintage. Try Croft Quinta da Roêda or Grahams Quinta dos Malvedos; decant it at the start of the evening.

And of course you will want Champagne. One of many good things about Champagne is that it’s relatively low in alcohol – usually around 12.5%. You’ll probably start the evening with bubbles and then pause them during the wait for midnight. So many Champagnes are discounted at the moment that it’s a good time to buy – or you could try an English sparkling. My favourites? Breaky Bottom, Gusbourne, Exton Park, Grange, Hundred Hills, Wiston, Harrow & Hope, Hambledon and, most of all if you can get it, Sugrue. Happy New Year.