Easter eggs for all this weekend, and if you cannot face the chocolate variety and want to dish up scrambled eggs and smoked salmon for a quick supper treat, don’t believe the claptrap you read about wine clashing with eggs. Good wine is not spoilt by a fresh egg, regardless of how you cook it. Sunday night in our house is soufflé or poached egg night, made with my sister-in-law’s delicious, flavour-charged freshly laid eggs, and not once has white, red or even pink wine suffered from this combination.

So eggs and wine it is. And given that you may want a verdant, spicy spring-like white for other Easter aperitif moments, look out for the 2005 Gobelsburger Riesling from Austria (£7.49, Waitrose). Red burgundy works well with eggs, too: the Burgundians love oeufs en meurette (poached eggs in red-wine sauce), and you can re-create this dish in Blighty using the sweet, ripe, grassy, gamey 2004 Sarrazin Bourgogne Rouge Vieilles Vignes (£7.99, Majestic, or buy two for £7.49 each).
Spring lamb, especially the mild, pale, melt-in-the-mouth, milk-fed version, and the tangy pré-salé or salt-marsh varieties, is best partnered with beaujolais, but I would be happy to drink the Sarrazin with it. Alternatively, plump for the wondrous 2004 Morgon des Souchons (£8.49, Oddbins), from Condemine-Pillet, whose rich, velvety, plum and raspberry fruit is a dream.

If you want to lay out half this sum, the beaujolais to go for is the tried-and-trusted 2004 Louis Jadot Beaujolais Villages Combe aux Jacques, whose ripe, elegant, cherry fruit is a spring star, with a quarter of the blend made from superior, declassified Régnié and Morgon fruit – as it’s Easter, buy three for £5.33 each at Thresher and Wine Rack.

Finally, chocoholics who want to drink a fancy wine and gorge on Easter eggs, and sweet-tooths who love marzipan-topped simnel cake, need to crack open bolder reds such as Mondavi’s sweet, ripe cassis-stashed 2001 Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon from California (£22.99, Tesco), and a luscious marzipan-scented Sauternes such as the 1994 Château Coutet, a bargain half-bottle Barsac, just £9.99 at Majestic. Happy Easter.

jane.macquitty@thetimes.co.uk

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