Christmas Wines with Le Petit Ballon *

When it comes to Christmas we all love to overindulge a little, but for me, it’s not the food I like to go a little over the top on, it’s the wines. That doesn’t mean I spend the entire festive period a little inebriated, I mean that I like to treat myself to a few really good bottles of wine and savour them. It is the time of year for treating yourself too, right!?

This year I put my trust into Le Petit Ballon to spoil me with their choices of bottles of wine; one red and one white.  Every bottle of Le Petit Ballon wine is selected by Jean-Michel Deluc, former Master Sommelier of the Ritz in Paris so he certainly knows his stuff! The team spend their year forming relationships with finest winemakers around the world to ensure the wines that Jean-Michel are tasting are tip top and worthy of selling on to the customers. But Le Petit Ballon aren’t just any old wine salesman though, they post out two bottles a month for you based on your wine preferences on your online profile.

So, having put my trust into Jean-Michel a box appeared at my flat not long before Christmas with a bottle of Bindi Sergardi’s La Boncia 2016, a
Chianti from Italy and a Château des Bois Mâcon Milly-Lamartine, a 2015 Chardonnay.

We popped open the Chianti first, on the 23rd December, as we had planned to have a nice meaty Spaghetti Bolognese for dinner and I’m always down for a good bottle of wine with that. It’s pretty rewarding after standing over the oven for a good while making the sauce from scratch.  The wine was full bodied, very easy to drink and the flavour really held its own over the flavours of the rich meal we were eating.

Something that I really love about the Bindi Sergardi wine estate is that the women of the family are the driving force behind it all and it’s been like that for a crazy 23 generations which is amazing! They have a new leading lady upfront so this tradition is set to continue for the foreseeable future too.

Our second bottle was the Chardonnay, and I have to be honest, we never buy Chardonnay ourselves as we’re so into our Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc’s at the minute so I was a little sceptical to start with!

I was so wrong! Milly-Lamartine is one of the most highly regarded wine-making villages in the area and I can totally see why. Le Petit Ballon recommends to have this with fish but we didn’t have any in so we rustled up some chicken and it went pretty darn well too! I have zero complaints!

I am pretty chuffed that we put our trust in Le Petit Ballon to pick our Christmas wines for our two pre-Christmas dinners at the flat! As they never send out wines you can buy in a Supermarket we tried something new and out of our comfort zones.

You can pop your trust into Le Petit Ballon any time you like for £30 a month, and we highly recommend giving it a go!