Wine: 2024 Paper Tiger Mourvèdre

Christmas dinner at our house is pretty traditional. We do a great, big spiral sliced ham, some version of a potato casserole with cheese, and a green veggie, this year’s iteration being roasted Brussels sprouts. These were particularly festive and delicious, as I roasted them with toasted pine nuts and Parmesan, then sprinkled in fresh pomegranate seeds. Our family Christmas dinner is modest, compared to the Christmases when my husband’s parents lived in town. Before they migrated South about 25 years ago, they used to host a family, potluck-style Christmas dinner, with ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, potato casserole, chicken and noodles (homemade, no less), green bean casserole, deviled eggs, and a whole bunch of pies, cookies, fudge, and toffee, all homemade, of course. Dinner was usually scheduled for around 3:00pm, but everyone was told it was at 1:00pm. This made it possible for one of my husband’s aunts to arrive at a fairly reasonable 4:00pm, a family joke that persists to this day.

I have fond memories of those dinners, not so much because of the food, though it was all delicious, but because my husband’s entire extended family gathered for a day of barely contained chaos. There were parents, grandparents, and siblings, along with an impressive collection of aunts, uncles, and cousins with their significant others. Sometimes, friends would get thrown into the mix – the more the merrier. When my generation began having babies, the house would get overstuffed with car seats and diaper bags. Once the babies were old enough, my mother-in-law began gathering them all in the breakfast area to decorate Christmas cookies. The kids loved it! By the end, they would all be covered in multi-colored icing and hopped up on sugar and sprinkles and would run through the house until the sugar high wore off, at which point they would end up asleep in various corners of the house like so many stuffed baby mice.

Back to Christmas 2025. At our house, it was just the four of us, myself, my husband, and our two grown children. With ham and potatoes on the menu, the wine would be a red. We chose the 2024 Paper Tiger Mourvèdre, a truly delicious and highly alcoholic wine made from grapes grown in Spain, originally brought there by the Phoenicians around 500 BC. At least that’s what Wikipedia says. The bottle says Vin de France, so I’m assuming this means Paper Tiger is made in France.