December is a particularly hectic time for wine merchants, so much so that at Yapp Brothers we (self) impose a ban on taking holidays until we’ve closed the doors on echoing cellars on Christmas Eve. So don’t tell my colleagues, but I managed to slip away to Barcelona for a long weekend to attend a wedding.

Boy, one can eat and drink well in Barcelona, especially as we were staying with our good friends, the multi-talented Joe and Niki who manage to find time when not designing shoes, making radio shows and documentaries, painting and DJ-ing to run tailored tours of the city (Antiques and Boutiques), one of which is Epicurean-themed. Yum!

Within 12 hours of arrival we had enjoyed Vietnamese dumplings in the Born (Mosquito) and were then ensconced at Biblioteca in Raval, enjoying Esqueixada (Catalan bacalao salad) washed down with Ruedan Verdejo. No weekend in Barcelona is complete without a visit to the 200 year old food market La Boqueria through which Niki effortlessly guided us as we picked up raw materials for Sunday lunch. At some point during an ambitiously programmed weekend I tailed off to sort out some wine for Sunday’s slow cooked pork on a fennel and garlic base, opting for a magnum of 2005 Rioja Coto de Imaz, then chucking in another couple of reds from Ribero del Duero for luck. In true Spanish style guests who were invited for dinner at 7pm arrived nearer 10, which made for a convivial evening , but a rather tough early morning flight to the UK, leaving my wife to keep the party going at the Calcotada (sweet roasted onion) Festival the next day.

If I had a pound for everybody who told me that they would like my job I wouldn’t need a sodding job and I could fulfil my destiny of becoming an international playboy – a role for which my forebears, rather short-sightedly, failed to provide adequate funds. Members of the general public naïvely assume that I spend ALL of my time sampling France’s vinous treasures and scoffing haute cuisine in high-end restaurants. Well, I do devote many hours to those activities but there are numerous more irksome aspects to being a wine merchant that never occur to the person cutting your hair or mixing your cocktail. Fielding phone calls from stroppy customers being a fine example. Only this morning an ennobled captain of industry threw a hissy fit and withdrew his custom because we were unable to furnish him with an astonishingly rare Northern Rhône Syrah. Tant pis – into each life some Grenache must fall.

Writing our annual wine list is another Herculean task that I wouldn’t wish on my mortal foe. I’d rather muck-out the Augean Stables any day. The problem isn’t writing about wine per se it is trying to come up with fresh angles on the same old same old. The whole thing has become like Groundhog Day and I find myself referring to ‘ozone fresh Muscadet’ and ‘briary, chest-thumping Côtes du Rhône’ on some kind of ghastly auto-pilot that it’s impossible to disengage.

Jason Yapp Wine Tasting at Le Gavroche

Few people credit it (barring critics and fellow vintners) but one can soon pall of fine dining if over-exposed to it. Like sex and drugs and rock and roll a surfeit can be worse than a deficiency. I am put to mind of the prisoners in Essex, Massachusetts who rioted in reaction to their invariant diet of lobster, and people who work in chocolate factories seldom take their work home with them. There are times when all one desires is a cup of tea and some hot-buttered toast and not a reduction of Jerusalem artichoke purée served with a tempura of hand-picked scallops on a bed of lambs lettuce and Perigord truffles.

Tasting wine all day is also a joyless experience. After a couple of hours the flavours start to meld in your mind until it is only the really weird offerings that register. Your teeth become blackened by juice and your tongue becomes furred with tannins and your faculties start to fade – it’s no wonder that so many wine journalists are semi-certifiable.

The area about which wine-muggles are most deluded is that of the wine buying trip. By day four or five the endless offerings of pieds de cochon, rillons, rillettes, tête de veau and pot au feu coupled with incessant par-fermented vat samples of unfinished wines can really take their toll. There is almost nothing less-pleasant than having to feign interest and maintain the sang froid in the face of a full-blown Gallic gastric crise. Indeed, it was only my latent triple-jumping skills and a providentially located toilette that saved me from disgracing myself at a very distinguished Château.

If you want my job you can have it – I’m going to re-train as a masseur!

(This article first appeared in Country Calling, 15/06/2011)

I was fortunate enough to spend last Thursday lunchtime at Le Gavroche selecting the wines for our forthcoming Spring lunch. I took the opportunity to buttonhole the head sommelier David Galetti, who presides over a list of biblical proportions, about his personal recommendations of wines to accompany asparagus.

David Galetti - Le Gavroche

When English asparagus is in season, as it is now, it can’t be beaten and my personal philosophy is to enjoy it as frequently as possible so I was keen to hear David’s recommendations. His first observation was that if asparagus is properly cooked it should still have a little bit of a ‘croquant’ bite and that you must therefore select a wine that is ‘fresh’ and isn’t heavily marked with oak. Although Sauvignon Blanc is widely acknowledged as being the classic accompaniment  (and they list our Pouilly Fumé ‘Les Loges’ from Dominique Guyot in bottles and halves at Le Gavroche – which would be  a good match) David said that it probably wouldn’t be his first choice. He looks for a wine with ‘a hint of citrus’ and averred that it is important to have some savoury herb notes too. Pinot Blanc and dry Chenin  Blanc ‘can work very well’ apparently – so I look forward to experimenting with some of those forthwith. David dis-recommended Chardonnay as a general rule “you don’t want anything too heavy, oaky or buttery” and surprised me with the revelation that his personal preference is for a Corsican Vermentino!

So what are you waiting for? Get the green spears of goodness on the stove and start experimenting with some fresh, clean Spring whites in the newly shipped 2010 vintage.

Over the last 2 or 3 years, roughly coinciding with the onset of the Global Financial Crisis (which we used to naively call the ‘Credit Crunch’), there has been a growing ground swell of interest in ‘natural’ wines. One might assume that as wine is made from fermented grape juice it essentially a fairly natural product anyway, but sadly this is not always the case. As with other areas of agriculture, big businesses have left no stone unturned in their efforts to maximise yields and profits and many of them readily deploy all manner of pesticides and chemical fertilizers to achieve those goals. Happily an increasing number of wine drinkers are starting to question the provenance of what they are consuming and are no longer content to buy the mass-produced, ersatz, branded wines so beloved of supermarkets.
One difficulty for the nascent ‘natural wine’ movement is that there isn’t actually an official definition of what a natural wine is. Obviously a natural wine should be made in sympathy with the environment in which it is produced, but unlike organic and bio-dynamic wine there are (as yet) no clear-cut parameters. Enthusiasts agree that natural wines should be made with ‘minimal intervention’ in the vineyard and cellar, but that is open to very broad interpretation. Nearly all natural wines are certified as organic, bio-dynamic or are en conversion to one of these two, but there are some celebrated producers that see the certification process itself as back to front.  Take Ron Laughton of Jasper Hill Vineyards in Heathcote, South Australia: “What I don’t understand, though, is that the dirty bastards who can indiscriminately use agrochemicals don’t require any certification, yet I am being pressurized to be certified to be clean. It’s all topsy-turvy and we should be working the other way, to have the dirty guys certified to poison our environment.”

Ron Laughton - Jasper Hill Vineyards

Natural wine makers eschew the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers and other commendable precepts that they favour are hand-harvesting of grapes, not using cultivated yeasts and not fining or filtering prior to bottling; which inevitably increases the amount of sediment but also makes for more characterful wines.
A further key question is the adding of sulphur dioxide [SO2] to wine as a stabilizing or preservative agent. This is a bit of a thorny issue as there is a small group of purists who don’t hold with deploying any sulphur at all. Personally I think this stance is rather extreme as I have had some nasty experiences with unstable wines suffering from problems, such as secondary fermentation after bottling, and I favour the more catholic stance that ‘low’ levels of sulphur [less than 50 milligrams per litre] are more prudent.

Anyway regardless of doctrine (and I rather like fact that the natural wine movement is broad-minded enough to permit some flexibility) I think it is terrific that people are becoming more environmentally conscious about how wine is produced and are looking for more carefully-crafted, greener and less rampantly commercial wines.
An exciting new development for any discerning wine lover is the inaugural Natural Wine Fair to be held in Borough Market, London in May (Sunday 15th for private customers, Monday 16th and Tuesday 17th for press and trade visitors). This pioneering event is the brainchild of globe-trotting, Gallic wine guru Isabelle Legeron (the first French female Master of Wine: www.thatcrazyfrenchwoman.com) and Eric Narioo and Doug Wregg of inspirational and iconoclastic importers Les Caves de Pyrenne.

Isabelle Legeron MW

The Natural Wine Fair is being co-hosted by 5 founding wine merchant partners, among whom we are very pleased to feature – Dynamic Vines, Wine Story and Aubert & Mascoli completing the quintet. The Fair will play host to over 100 acclaimed wine makers who will be on hand to talk visitors through their wine-making philosophies as they sample their wares.  There will also be talks and presentations by experts on related topics, so this represents an ideal opportunity for those interested in natural wine to get further acquainted with the concept.

Some further happy news is that we have managed to cajole our old chum Glen Baxter into designing this superb poster for the occasion which is sure to become a collectors’ item.

So if you are bored to the back teeth of staid supermarket offerings, want to try some green, characterful and expressive wines, or are just curious what all the fuss is about do visit: www.thenaturalwinefair.com and book your tickets to what promises to be one of the best wine tasting events of the year. I look forward to seeing you there.

(This article first appeared in Spectator Scoff, April 2011)

I have several items to declare: bags of prejudice, a heap of self-interest, a smidgen of latent snobbery and chips on both shoulders. But even accounting for all of the above it can’t just be me who finds buying wine in a supermarket a joyless, soulless and utterly dispiriting experience. Wine is one of nature’s most precious gifts, and its acquisition should be a joy, not an ordeal.

Most of the major multiples employ a smattering of Masters of Wine (of whom there are only 288 in existence), so there is no shortage of in-house product knowledge, but sadly this is seldom evident at the point of sale. I think the principal problem here is the buying remit — ‘squeezing suppliers by the knackers until their eyes water’ is the principal thrust, whatever anyone else may tell you — which begins to take the fun out of the equation.

A further issue is that of the colossal volumes required to supply hundreds of outlets, which means that, with the exception of some token window-dressing, everything sold has to be made in industrial volumes to appeal to the lowest common denominator. A good friend of mine has just celebrated selling his 10,000,000th bottle of Pinot Grigio to one of our more rampant retailers — every little helps! Obviously it is popular, but only because it is liquid, contains alcohol and is, just about, potable.

The sad reality is that most of the wines on offer in supermarkets are bland and boring and made for lack of faults rather than optimum quality or, heaven forfend, interest. This is the world of arch-mediocrity, the vinous equivalent of airline food or a soap opera. There is no edge and no passion, and no one cares about you or your taste or opinion: you are just a statistic. What matters is how many centimetres of shelf space have been rented by Leviathan corporations to shift billions of bottles of booze.

Don’t even get me started on supermarket ‘discounting’: ‘Usually £12.99, down to £6.50 while stocks last’ is just cobblers. The most hardened barrow boy or fairground huckster would be embarrassed by the extent of this duplicity. What it actually means is that having secured a tanker-load of surplus plonk, the vendor in question (take your pick — they all do it) has, in order to jump through legal loopholes, put said wine on sale at a ludicrously inflated price at one of its furthest-flung outlets in the boondocks. After approximately 48 hours they then have carte blanche to invoke the ‘discount’ and roll out the deception throughout the land. They say we’re all suckers for a bargain. We’re certainly suckers if we fall for this ruse.

The ambience of the in-store ‘store’ is another bugbear of mine — the vile strip lighting, the cynically brand-dominated galley aisle-ends, and the total absence of anybody who actually gives a toss what your guests are going to be drinking with their ‘taste the difference’ snail porridge on Saturday night.

Of course, there are exceptions that prove the rule (Waitrose on Marylebone High Street is actually pretty decent, but it’s hardly representative) and there are some perfectly palatable wines that are available in Les Grandes Surfaces, but it’s the blinking, arms-length, BOGOF, ‘great with a potato’, ‘Good, Ordinary Chassange-Montrachet’, never-knowingly-undersold-but-you-can’t-commune-with-a-human-being hubris of the great majority of supermarket wine departments that I find galling. They’re Great With Nothing.

Jason is the embittered co-proprietor of ailing independent wine merchant Yapp Brothers. www.yapp.co.uk

Last month we received the sad news that Isabelle Barantin had finally succumbed to the circling sharks and sold the iconic monopole vineyard of Château Grillet to François Pinault of Château Latour. I spoke to Isabelle on the phone shortly afterwards and made the mistake of congratulating her on the sale – the property had been discreetly on the market for quite some time. ‘Ne dis jamais ça’ was her terse response. Isabelle made it very clear to me that she had been a reluctant vendor – still a few million Euros in the current account must sugar the pill to some extent. While it is a shame that this unique 3.8 hectare site is passing out of a family ownership that dates back to the French Revolution at least Isabelle can leave with her head held high having restored the vineyard and wine to their full, outstanding potential during her 17 year stewardship.

Chateau Grillet estate by Jason Yapp.

I speak from direct experience as Yapp Brothers have shipped straight from the Château since the early 1970′s and I cannot think of a wine that has been more commercially controversial. Robert Parker described Château Grillet as being ‘overpriced and overrated’ in his 1997 book wines of the Rhône, which is not what you want to read when you are sitting on pallets of the stuff. For years I had a running dialogue with Jancis Robinson who doggedly catalogued its short-comings (there was even a derogatory comparison to Harrogate springs!) before she was finally won-over by the 2004 vintage: “France’s most idiosyncratic appellation, devoted to one producer with one amphitheatre of Viognier vines has been difficult to love for many vintages but in 2004 white Bordeaux wizard Denis Dubourdieu was brought in to give the wine a good scrub and here at last we have real freshness even at three years old. There’s a deeply mineral nose and then dense fruit and a wonderfully creamy finish. Even the most jaded wine enthusiast would be fascinated by this evidence of a new era at this famous white Rhône landmark.” Which, if you are trying to sell it, is much more uplifting.

Once, after a tasting in the Crown Hotel in Southwold when a room full of Masters of Wine had roundly berated the 1990 vintage, I did consider throwing in the towel but the great Rhône guru John Livingstone-Learmonth (www.drinkrhone.com) persuaded me to keep the faith on the grounds that the terroir at Château Grillet is unique and capable of producing outstanding wines.  Happily he was right (as gurus often are) and the vintage run from 2003 onwards, under Monsieur Dubourdieu’s influence has been fantastic. I tasted the 2005 last week with Farr Vintners boss Stephen Browett at Chabrot Bistro d’Amis  (www.chabrot.co.uk). It’s a bargain there, in London restaurant terms, at £95 a bottle and is drinking beautifully now. It is still a little closed on the nose and merits decanting but it has great vigour, length and minerality and is the perfect foil for classic French cuisine. I think it has a least a decade’s happy drinking ahead of it – as does the 2006 which is also stupendous. We are about to ship the keenly anticipated 2007 which will, I suppose, mark the end of an era. If the rumours of what M. Pinault paid for the property are even half accurate it may well also be the last ever vintage of Château Grillet that is remotely affordable, so my (highly partial) advice is to fill your boots before the Bordelais ramp up the prices – it’s unquestionably a buyers’ market!