Christmas tends to be all about family, its presence or absence, and you don’t have to be a psychiatrist’s daughter to view that as complicated – although when the psychiatrist in question is both Australian and Jewish it certainly puts a child out of sync with peers focused on stockings, Santa and snow. These days, my reconfigured household has traditions – and complications – of its own, which, if you discount presents (and how I wish I could), largely revolve around food and drink. From roast monkfish with snails on Christmas Eve to eggnog made with Canadian rye whiskey and the almond galette des rois, with its hidden bean, that marks Twelfth Night in French tradition, we have cobbled together an idiosyncratic but delicious repertoire reflecting our status as a blended family – part English, part Canadian and part Australian, but largely based in Burgundy.
The wines are my department and this year I have decided to concentrate on indigenous varieties: vines rooted in specific places will help celebrate our internationalism. Perverse? Perhaps. If so, my father would surely have approved.
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