Three Wines To Enhance Your New Year’s Eve Celebrations

A great New Year’s Eve party unfolds in stages: a festive arrival, a special wine to enjoy with the meal, and of course the traditional bubbles at midnight. You can pull out all the stops and spend a bundle on entertaining if you’d like, but choose carefully within a budget and your hosts or guests will never know the difference.

Here are three suggestions, one for each phase of the party, either to serve to your guests or to bring along as a guest yourself, that won’t break the bank as we look to be frugal heading into 2023. Happy New Year!

Segura Viudas Brut Reserva Cava
Catalonia, Spain
LCBO # 216960 $16.95

An effervescent opening sets an energetic tone for the festivities. If you’d typically have Prosecco on arrival but you’re open to something different, consider a Cava instead. These Spanish sparkling wines, typically produced in Catalonia, use the same method as Champagne but employ grapes that are native to the region. This example, which is labeled as vegan, has apple and toasted coconut on the nose that give way to a smooth palate with a complex melange of nutty, toasty, and buttery flavours with minimal acidity. It would be a great accompaniment to grazing boards or trays of rich baked or fried appetizers, or you can make the most of its Champagne-like qualities and save it for midnight.
Score: 8/10

Sterling Vineyards Heritage Collection Merlot 2017
Napa Valley, California
LCBO # 330241 $37.95

Okay, this one’s not as much of a budget-saver. But here’s why we’ve included it: this is a great wine to bring to a party where you don’t know what’s being served for dinner and you don’t know the tastes of the people who are attending. Merlot is a perennial crowd-pleaser with its traditional medium-bodied profile of ripe red fruits. This bottle from Sterling Vineyards in California’s Napa Valley is no exception with its full and spicy nose of red plum and raspberry, followed up on the palate with blackberry and blueberry in the mix along with an approachable level of tannin and a long, smooth, buttery finish. It’s special enough to mark the occasion, and you’re also sure to enjoy whatever amount ends up in your own glass. And it truly is versatile enough to match with just about anything.
Score: 8.5/10

Louis Bouillot Perle d'Aurore Brut Rosé Crémant de Bourgogne
Burgundy, France
LCBO # 48793 $23.95 (on sale at the LCBO for $21.95 until January 1)

Some people care deeply about serving the best of the best Champagne when midnight rolls around. But at the New Year’s Eve parties I go to, by the time the countdown starts there’s less focus on particulars like region and price than there is on toasting with something delicious and refreshing. If you think your fellow imbibers will enjoy something different—or if you think you can slip a lower-cost lookalike bottle past them without them noticing it’s not true Champagne—there are plenty of bottles from other regions of France or beyond to consider. Crémant de Bourgogne is produced in Burgundy and transforms the region’s still wines into effervescent equivalents using the traditional method. This example integrates two of the region’s signature grapes, Pinot noir and Chardonnay, along with some Gamay to create a bubbly Burgundy with precision: it pours pink into the glass with a nose full of strawberry, which continues onto the palate before giving way to flavours of green apple, lemon, and toasted nuts, all underlaid with a rich and creamy mouth feel. It’s an ideal way to ring in a new year.
Score: 9/10