Food & wine

In Season: May

How to make the most of what’s in season this month and the wines to match.

Steve Farrow

6 May 2025

May is one of the most glorious of months for seasonal produce in the UK with the joys of spring stars at their height and the promise of summer coming down the line. Get your wine racks prepped and ready for all the delights of the season!

The Society's Wine Information Editor

Steve Farrow

Having spent several years in The Showroom, Steve likes nothing more than chatting with members about food and wine and is our in-house Wine Without Fuss food and wine man.

Morels and Saint George’s mushrooms

Mushrooms are generally an autumn thing, but spring provides real treats on the funghi front but harder to source without foraging. Morels and Saint George’s mushrooms (the latter named because they traditionally appear around 23rd April, new weather patterns notwithstanding) flourish about now. Both are delicious simply sautéed in butter with garlic and some parsley and piled on hot buttered toast, or in a sumptuous omelette, perhaps with bacon lardons. A glass of two of chardonnay is just the thing here and the addition of the bacon invites an easy-going pinot noir and other lighter reds onboard. The French make a creamy sauce for chicken with morels and Vin Jaune from Alpine Jura, and that region’s wines are great here, with the easy alternative of fino and manzanilla sherry in place of Vin Jaune for both sauce and accompaniment.

Elderflowers

Elderflowers really bloom beautifully in May and beyond and their heady scent is a hooterful of spring and summer. We gather them every year and make a lot of the fragrant cordial for mixing with all kinds of great-value sparkling wines to bring them a different dimension in the sunshine. The cordial makes a wonderful jelly to eat solo with whipped cream or to encase strawberries. Serve both with wonderfully grapy, equally headily scented Moscato d’Asti or Clairette de Die and other less bubbly muscats. You can also dip the whole (carefully checked for insects) flower heads into a tempura batter, fry them and dust with caster sugar while fresh from the pan for a surprisingly gorgeous treat to enjoy with the bubbly muscats above.

Wild turbot and samphire

Homegrown asparagus is fantastic, with a short but sweet, window of opportunity to make the most of it charms, starting, roughly around St George’s Day on the 23rd of the month. It’s the epitome of spring for me – the very definition of green shoots – but the longer the spears go uneaten after picking the sooner they lose their fresh sweetness. Its assertive grassy flavours can be a challenge for wine, but a great match for simply cooked spears, is dry muscat or muscat-led wines and there’s nowhere better for it than France and Spain. Mirroring the spears’ green herbaceousness, sauvignon blanc is also a cracker with simply steamed asparagus. If luxuriously bathed in buttery sauces like hollandaise, the dish will need something with more richness whilst retaining freshness – think Chablis or lightly oaked chardonnays.

Watercress

Now, here’s a real flavour of spring and one that has really got into its swing in May – peppery, deep-green watercress. Absolutely brilliant as a salad with rare beef, steaks and more, it can be the star and co-star too. A watercress sauce made with crème fraîche is a joy with fillets of salmon or trout, and a bottle of grüner veltliner brings a subtle peppery undertone and fresh fruit to proceedings. You can also make a delicious pesto with watercress, garlic, pine nuts or toasted almonds, Parmesan or Pecorino cheese, olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. Tossed with pasta it’s a joy with something dry and Italian or one of Portugal’s crop of delicious dry whites. Finally, the classic watercress soup. Soups are trickier to marry with wine but a crisp, bone-dry, umami-stacked fino or manzanilla sherry will sing (or perhaps ‘zing’) with it.