You’d think Santa would have enough to do at this time of the year but it seems even the big man has time to help out in one of Australia’s best wineries.

We didn’t think they needed the help but the team at Langmeil captured these pics on security cameras in their Barossan winery. With some elvish intervention, the 2009 vintage could be one to watch out for!

Langmeil range available from Curious Wines here (although we’ll be waiting a while for this particular vintage!).

Resist though we might, Curious have jumped the festive frenzy bandwagon and opened our doors seven days a week for the next three weeks.

Our wine warehouse in Bandon will be open 2.00pm to 6.00pm on Sunday the 6th, 13th and 20th of December, in addition to our regular Monday to Saturday opening hours.

Last orders for Christmas delivery nationwide will be 1.00pm Monday 21st December, with the warehouse open right up to Christmas Eve.

Full holiday opening and closing hours:

Tue 1st to Wed 23rd December: Mon-Sat 10.30am-6.00pm, Sun 2.00pm-6.00pm
Thu 24th December: 10.30am-4.30pm
Fri 25th December: CLOSED
Sat 26th December: CLOSED
Sun 27th December: CLOSED
Mon 28th December: CLOSED
Tue 29th December: CLOSED
Wed 30th December: 10.30am-6.00pm
Thu 31st December: 10.30am-3.00pm
Fri 1st January: CLOSED
Sat 2nd January: CLOSED
Sun 3rd January: CLOSED
Mon 4th January: Normal trading resumes Mon-Sat 10.30am-6.00pm.

Do call into us if you’re passing between now and New Year’s, but do be warned: we’ve a serious amount of wine to choose from!

I was in two Cork hotels over the Christmas period for parties – the sit-down meals with crackers and hats varieties. In both, we indulged in some of the respective House Wines – you know, the stuff that smells of turps and takes the paint off skirting boards.

No, wait a minute, I’m thinking of actual turps – there must have been a mistake – surely the days of bad wine should be long gone, particularly when you’re paying €20 a bottle for it?

Well apparently not. Some hotels and restaurants still think it’s acceptable to select their house wine on the basis of maximum mark-up for the maximum prices people will bear before walking out on first sight of the wine list.

I won’t embarrass the hotels, or more importantly my company on the respective occasions, but the point does need to be considered generally. In one, a premium and fairly new Cork hotel, the house red was a Chilean Cabernet, at €23 a little on the steep side for house plonk but as it was a Christmas party we bit hard and ordered.

It wasn’t corked, it was just bad – harsh and tannic, little fruit, paint-strippingly astringent. We ended up drinking beer for the night.

This practice of profit over any semblance of quality vexes me greatly. As a business owner I am acutely aware of the need to make a margin, and I’m quite sure the aforementioned (otherwise very pleasant) hotels have considerable overheads, but this is ultimately self-defeating, and does neither the wine nor hospitality industries any favours at all. People just won’t continue accepting this level of bad value and poor attention to quality.

So my one big wish for 2009 is that hotels and restaurants, particularly the good ones, put a bit more effort into choosing their house wines, for their customers’ benefits as well as their margins. There is a happy middle ground, and a huge opportunity - make good wine a little more accessible and people will spend more, even in a recession.

So after the excitement of Santa visiting – evidenced on Christmas morning by an empty port glass by the fireplace and our eldest two’s eyes like side-plates – it was all hands on deck for the traditional glutton-fest of Christmas dinner.

I’ve always been a wine-with-food person so the day’s wine menu had been planned with almost as much precision as the 37 accompaniments to the turkey.

We kicked off around noon with a Pink Champagne, the perfect aperitif for a family occasion given the celebratory associations and the accessible, fruitier style of the bán-dearg variety.

For our seafood starter, we tried a Macon-Uchizy from M&S – buttery, citrusy Chardonnay, with just enough oak to complement the smokiness of the fish but good fruit concentration to bring out the sweetness of the prawns.

The Christmas roast is often cited as an impossible meal to match wine with, given the range and depth of flavours from the piled-high meats, veg and sauces, but I think we nailed it with the New Zealand Pinot Noir we’d been banging on about. The perfect balance of sweet fruit, tight acidity and soft tannins, it was truly heavenly.

After teas and espressos came dessert, and a special import from Matt’s travels in New Zealand at the start of the year – Siefried Riesling Ice Wine from Nelson. For me, ice wine is the ultimate wine indulgence – nothing compares to the incredible concentration of flavour and character, and this was a smashing example, proving once again the humbling nobility of Riesling, as well as the restless quality and invention from the Kiwis.

Later, and finally, as the day drew to a close and three exhausted kids hit the hay, we indulged ourselves in a big flavour red, the 2005 Glaetzer Amon-Ra. This was one we were very happy to enjoy without food – absolutely crammed with flavour and depth but incredible silky smoothness in a wine so young.

Five intriguingly different but appropriately special wines, and between eight of us over 8 or 9 hours, a little Christmas indulgence but far from debauchery. And sure, if you can’t spoil yourselves at Christmas…

Our blog posts have been quiet the last week, and understandably so. It’s been an encouraging month for one of Ireland’s latest entrants into the online retail scene. With online orders taking an upsurge and our warehouse in Bandon becoming the talk of the town, Curious Wines is really starting to make a name for itself. And people just keep coming back for more!

We will be dispatching our last national orders today (22nd) and starting again on January 2nd. Although if you live in Bandon, Cork, Clonakilty or anywhere in between, we’ll deliver those personally, before and between Christmas and New Year.

Our opening hours for the warehouse are as following:

Monday 22nd 10.30am-6.00pm

Tuesday 23rd 10.30am-6.00pm

Wednesday 24th 10.30am-5.00pm

25th - 28th  Closed

Monday 29th 10.30am-5.00pm

Tuesday 30th 10.30am-5.00pm

Wednesday 31st 10.30am-5.00pm

Thursday 1st January  Closed

Friday 2nd January  Closed

Saturday 3rd January Business as usual.

And finally, we would like to wish you all a very happy Christmas and best wishes for the New Year.

Lots of love,

The Curious Family

Save your cheesecake and Banoffee pies ’til St. Stephen’s Day. This heavenly dessert is best enjoyed on Christmas Day with Keith Tulloch’s critically acclaimed Botrytis Semillon.

Christmas Pudding

Makes 4 small puddings, which serve about 4-5 each

½ lb / 225g beef suet
4oz / 115g breadcrumbs
8oz / 225g raisins
12oz / 340g sultanas
4oz / 115g currants
4 eggs
4oz / 115g plain flour
2oz / 55g glacé cherries
¼ tsp salt
¾ lb brown sugar
1 dessertspoon mixed spice
1 large apple, peeled and cut into chunks
1 lemon, finely grated rind and juice
4oz / 115g mixed peel
2oz / 55g shredded almonds
1 measure (about 35ml) rum or whiskey
½ × 330ml bottle stout

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large basin and then add the lemon rind, juice and apple.  Beat the eggs well and add with the rum or whiskey.  Add the stout and mix well again.  The mixture should be of a consistency that drops of a spoon easily, add a little more stout if necessary.

Fill 4 bowls ¾ full with the mixture, to leave room for swelling.  Cover the top of the mixture with greased greaseproof paper and top the bowls with another sheet of greaseproof paper and a pudding cloth.  Secure these tops with string, leaving a loop for easy lifting.  Put the bowls in a pot of boiling water that comes half-way up the bowls.  Boil steadily for 3 hours and keep adding boiling water in case the pot goes dry.

These puddings will keep in a dry cool place for up to 12 months.  To re-heat, boil again for 3 hours, or microwave until completely heated through.

Don’t panic, but there are only 25 days until Christmas. While we can’t cook for you, or wrap the presents under your tree, we can help you out with some suggestions for wine accompaniments to the all important Christmas dinner.

Perfect aperitif is a New Zealand Riesling - preferably just off-dry, i.e. just a hint of sweetness. Riesling produces the best white wines in the world, and New Zealand produces some of the most reliable - crisp acidity to offset that gorgeous fruit sweetness is a trademark.
Recommend: Coney Ragtime Riesling

For the turkey, it has to be Pinot Noir, the finest red grape in the world. Pinot works with turkey because of the sweet fruit complementing the dryness of the turkey. Once again, New Zealand is producing wines to rival Burgundy (the home of Pinot Noir), and tend to show more sweet fruit than their French counterparts.
Recommend: Waipara Springs Premo Pinot Noir

And for the dessert course, there’s the just divine Keith Tulloch Botrytis Semillon 2005:

A drink-it-now-or-keep-it-for-a-decade style of wine. The choice is yours. Either way this is a gem, with goose pimple-inducing citrus purity. This wine impresses everyone who tastes it.

In addition to making gorgeous drinking at your dinner table, any of these wines would make top-notch gifts for friends, family and hostess gifts for holiday parties, too. A trio of all three, labled by course, would make an outstanding holiday present, but if you can only bare to part with one, they won’t know what they’re missing.

While you may be panicked to discover there are only 39 days until Christmas, this is nothing like the panic you’ll experience when you’re invited to drop by half a dozen holiday parties at the last minute and realise you’ve no gift for your host or hostess. (Your mammy would slap you and you know it.)

The lucky winner of our Curious Christmas Survival Contest will win:

• A half case of glorious wine - three reds and three whites.
• Six handsome chrome wine stoppers.
• Six organza bags to hold one wine stopper each.
• Six chic little gift tags specially made for wine bottles.

This Christmas Survival Kit is craftily designed to bail you out of last minute gift giving situations by making it look like you thoughtfully put together a wonderful gift for Auntie Maude, who you of course knew was coming to Christmas dinner. Put the stopper in the bag, sign the hang tag, hang them both from the wine bottle neck, and cheerfully hand them over with your best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

How to Enter: To save yourself from cringe-inducing Christmas disaster, all you have to do to enter the contest is join our monthly newsletter. We’ll draw a winner at random on the 2nd of December and deliver your Survival Kit the day after (or whenever you’d like) free of charge. You are of course completely welcome to un-join the minute after the draw is done, but we only send one newsletter per month and we like giving discounts and free stuff to our members, so we hope you’ll stick around!