Ham or Lamb?

Thanksgiving, turkey is served but at Easter most people have either ham or lamb. As always with big gatherings, match the wine to the guests first and the food second. After all, they are the ones drinking it, not the cooked meat.

Ham is pork, cured with smoke and salt. To counterbalance the smoke and the salt, most people glaze their hams. The salty, smokey, sweet combination needs to be harmonized with the fruitiest wine you can stand. My first choice would be a German Riesling of Spatlese or Auslese level. Spatlese literally means to pick late. If you leave fruit on the vine longer, it gets sweeter naturally. Auslese means to pick out. As bunches are hand harvested, some of the bunches are noticeably riper, sweeter, than other. These extra sweet bunches are placed in a separate smaller hod attached to the normal size hod on the backs of the pickers. An inexpensive but good Spatlese is the Schmidt-Sohne around $11 a bottle. Most Spatleses are between $20-30 a bottle. I have two from the 2002 vintage, from the same producer but two different vineyard sites. Langwerth von Simmern is the producer, the two great vineyard sites are Hattenheimer Wisselbrunnen and Erbacher Marcobrunn, each around $30 a bottle.

Lamb is easier. Your favorite red wine not Pinot Noir. Yup, this is the show-off meat for any red wine other than Pinot Noir. Bordeaux, California, Italy, Spain, on and on just pick your or your guests favorite. To be fair, some people like Pinot Noir with lamb. I am not one of them.

And of course this year after dinner is done, you can choose to watch the Red Sox play the Yankees in Boston. On a rare warm and dry night in April, if you choose to believe the meterologists.