In the bleak midwinter, we should all remember the gifts of summer

Christmas was invented in order to absorb the pagan festivals of the New Year. Like them, its theme is renewal, and like them it is designed to outwit the spirit of winter by recalling the gifts of summer. Hence dried fruit, plum pudding and mincemeat have won a special place at the Christmas table: they are memories of fruitfulness in a time of dearth, the life-in-death focus of a primeval vegetation cult.

Nothing that we consume is more pregnant with the memory of summer fruit than wine. The springtime flowering and autumnal ripeness of the grape linger ghostlike at the bottom of the glass, and each spring a secondary fermentation makes muted music in the bottle. Hence wine ought always to be the centrepiece of Christmas feasts. It expresses the truth behind those old pagan cults in the language of the Christian Eucharist.

The wines on offer from Bibendum illustrate the point. The excellent champagne from Albert Beerens is aged for six years in bottle before release, and recalls those six yeasty springs with a faint sigh on the tongue - a sigh that is also yours. We forgave the trendy Michel Laroche for the screw-top bottle, on account of the clean, Brunelleschi-like contours of his wine, which paints the Kimmeridge clay soil of Chablis on to the palate, reminding us that we, too, live on Kimmeridge clay. By a deft twist of the hand we released from the bottle the antediluvian meaning of our Swindon subsoil: what a revelation!

The Catena Chardonnay is a stunning illustration of what can be achieved when soil, grape, oak and inspiration achieve equilibrium. In this rounded, genial wine the cask has become a memory, like the recall of childhood that haloes our moments of surrender. This is a serious and underpriced competitor to white Burgundy, and an enjoyable reminder that Christmas, in Argentina, is a midsummer feast.

The reds are a mixed bunch. Les Tourelles is the second wine of Chateau Pichon-Longueville, and has some way to go before maturity. It fanfares its journey down the oesophagus with the blackcurrant breath and grape-skin jacket of Pauillac, then crashes past the taste buds like a gang of hooligans, leaving graffiti of tannin on the throat. One day this wine will grow up and settle down, though I suspect that "up" will always compete with "down". Whether the d'Arenberg Laughing Magpie will ever settle down I do not know. Made from Syrah with a 7 per cent dose of Viognier, it is designed to imitate the red-and-white mixtures of the Rhone. It has won prizes in the Pacific, and roars from the bottle like a didgeridoo. Quite unlike the lovely, sunny, olive-and-mulberry-flavoured Gigondas, which brings news that "Midwinter spring is its own season/ Sempiternal though [just a little] sodden towards sundown".

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