English red wine festive pairings

At Christmas time, food and drink takes centre stage as we come together with our friends and family to celebrate the year that’s past. If you’re looking for something slightly different this festive season, why not bring home a few bottles of English red wine? Our Rondo is a fruity release perfect for pairing with umami-based dishes and decadent desserts. If you’ve not had the pleasure of sampling the wonderful Rondo grape before, it’s one for the existing Pinot Noir lovers, bursting with fruity notes. 

With delicate hints of vanilla, dark cherries and a damson nose, our Rondo is a medium bodied wine. Notes of dark currants and a hint of pepper lifts the cherry flavour, whilst a gentle oaked edge and light tannins bring this single variety wine to a playfully pleasing finish.  

For festive pairings, start with a hard cheese and honey canapé. The creaminess of the cheese complements the fruity notes in the wine, to start your festive feast in the right way. Delicious with beef, our Rondo could also be the perfect bottle for a Boxing Day feast pairing. A great fruity option for indulgent and decadent desserts, try matching our Rondo with a Black Forest Trifle; a fruity and chocolate-y indulgence that’s a vibrant accompaniment to the vanilla notes and cherry flavours in the wine. 

And for some table talk outside of Trivial Pursuit, here are a few Rondo-based facts for you to bring to Christmas lunch: 

• A dark-skinned grape, in the UK Rondo is currently planted across 61 hectares in the UK. For comparison, Chardonnay covers 1,288 hectares. 
• A hybrid grape, it was created in 1964, and has been a protected variety since 1997. 
• When cultivated in the UK, Rondo bursts with fruit flavours from cherries to plums. 

Our Rondo is proudly grown in Herefordshire, lining our village vineyard. Resistant to the chills of an English winter, in contrast it absorbs the warm English summer, ripening into an almost midnight blue grape. Our bottling is one of the few single grape varieties available from English vineyards, but the grape is growing in popularity and increasingly being used in blends in the UK. 

Take home a bottle of English red this Christmas, and make sure you share your pairings with us on our social channels @RadlowHundred. We’d love to see which creations you make in the kitchen this Christmas that match perfectly with our Rondo!