1995 Château Prieuré-Lichine Margaux 4th Growth - well suited to roast beef on Christmas day.

What better wine to go with our rib of organic beef for Christmas day? We weren't disappointed. The beef was nicely prepared, the French way, with garlic inserted into the flesh, an onion on top and a knob of butter and salt and pepper. I also opened a bottle of dry white to pour some over the beef three quarters of the way through the cooking.

After putting the beef in the oven I decided to decant the wine. Stupidly, I used a wine-waiter's corkscrew to open the bottle and the cork broke. There was no way I could extract the rest of the cork without some crumbs of cork getting into the wine. I now had to decant the wine using a tea strainer to filter out the bits of cork but inevitably some of the cork remained in the wine. Luckily, I avoided getting sediment into the wine as well.

After decanting the wine I tasted some of the wine remaining in the bottle. The sediment does you no harm. The wine tasted wonderful and there was no harm done but I should have used a screw pull model. I am not too bothered by a little bit of cork in my wine and my wife isn't either provided that the wine is good.

Our beef was cooked perfectly and we used some of the juices to make a sauce. The beef was medium on the outside but pink in the middle.

The 1995 Château Prieuré-Lichine was perfect as it was fully mature and ready for drinking. It was just starting to turn a burgundy colour and it had a nose of plums and black currants. It had medium to full body, with softening tannin and well balanced acidity and it was dry. It tasted similar to its smell but it had the typical flavour of  the spice and vanilla of a Bordeaux matured in oak. The wine was complex and concentrated but with the silky feel of a Margaux in the mouth. In my opinion this wine is worthy of more than a 4th growth classification. The wine was a truly wonderful accompaniment to the food. If you want to know what a top wine is really about then buy a bottle of this one. In the UK it will cost you £44 or so but in France you can find it a lot cheaper. You could pay ten times as much for a 1st growth Bordeaux but a first growth will not taste that much better even though it might keep longer.

I spent a little more on this wine than I am normally prepared for good Bordeaux (about £20) but it was well worth it. 1995 was a good vintage in Bordeaux.