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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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!
Oddbins likely descent into administration marks a dark day for UK wine retailing, not just because of the millions of pounds owed to suppliers, which is a bitter enough pill to swallow, but because they used be a shining beacon of verve, imagination and flair which has now disappeared from our high streets – seemingly for good.
Like many of my contemporaries I cut my teeth in the wine trade working for Oddbins and learned a great deal very rapidly. In the late 1980’s I’d graduated from University with an impressively large overdraft and through the testimony of a friend was taken on as a temporary van driver, at the George Street shop in Marylebone, as a stop gap until I could secure a ‘proper’ job. The problem was I just loved working there and didn’t really want a proper job. Fortunately, my lamentable driving skills soon saw me transferred to the shop floor and here I was in my element. I was carefully schooled by a bunch of wine-loving, academic drop outs in the rudiments of wine tasting, customer care, balancing the books on the dreaded ‘Weekly Trading Return’ and low-budget marketing. Who can forget those blackboards? ‘Last Stop for the Betty Ford clinic’ didn’t go down well with head office but they loved ‘Our Delicious Drinks Bring Immense Natural Satisfaction’.
True, the pay was pretty poor and the hours were long but there were many upsides. You could wear what the hell you wanted to work, you could play Clash albums (loudly) and spend the day chatting to hugely knowledgeable colleagues and customers and sample lots of interesting wines. I vividly recall sitting round in the shop after closing hours sampling my first, earth-moving taste of Krug with a take away pizza and thinking I’d found my calling. One day the manager sent me to do the banking and when I came back I told him we were £20 ‘over’ the sum we’d declared. ‘I know’ he replied with a knowing smile. You can’t teach stuff like that – it has to be learned in situ.
Having paid my dues I passed slowly through the ranks and ended up managing the Islington Green shop on Upper Street N1 in the early 1990’s. Those were happy days. We had a great team in the form of Helen the deputy manager, who could handle all the paperwork I couldn’t fathom, and Gilbert, the Australian senior sales assistant who had a fine line in deadpan humour. A busy executive once asked him if he could give him a quote for a Christmas party, to which he replied: “Sure – I hope this goes better than last year.” The point is we all enjoyed working there and the clientele appreciated that – there was a terrific rapport between the shop staff and the customers that was rare and special and I think we all knew that.
Eventually the long hours, modest remuneration and hideous 14 hour monthly stock counts took their toll and I decamped to try my luck harvesting grapes in Provence but to this day I owe Oddbins a great deal – they provided inspiration and proved selling wine could be great fun and I’ll always be grateful for that.
(This blog is re-published from the website of our friends Claud The Butler)
There is a little corner of Wiltshire that will be forever France...
Claud is beside himself with excitement at the prospect of a whole day spent in the Yapp Brother’s yard in Mere alongside his buddy, the Yapp blue Citroen H delivery van and his close cousin, the very distinguished Citroen ‘Traction Avant’. And we’re feeling the excitement too as we set up in the courtyard of this award-winning and deliciously ‘under-the-radar’ wine merchants and prepare for a day serving coffee and cake to discerning oenophiles. The eagerly awaited Yapp Brothers ‘Bin End Wines’ Sale is underway, early risers make their way across the courtyard to the ‘tasting’ room, choices are made. No wonder coffee seemed like a good idea.
Jason Yapp is busy co-ordinating a small, dedicated band of staff, but finds time to drop by to shoot the breeze and fill us in on a little of the history of the place. The fountain full of aquamarine water to the right of Claud is a replica of the original at Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the Rhône, and the grotto to his left is a hang-over from brewery days. Beer was kept cool in the grotto – until the family of brewers fell under the influence of the Temperance movement and turned their attentions to skimmed milk production. Jason’s father, Yapp père, has stopped by for coffee too, and sits in the morning sunshine in Claud’s café as if it were a regular feature of his Saturday mornings. Jason shows us black and white photo boards of the dilapidated state of the buildings when his father first bought them, way back in the late sixties. Today they nestle side-by-side, resplendent in the colours of Southern France, all blues, turquoises and yellows. Hard to imagine we’re in Wiltshire on the warmest day of the year so far.
Today ‘Team Claud’ is joined by guest member, George, taking time out from his high-flying London legal career to don an apron and help his mum with her new venture. It’s a family affair. The smell of coffee beans fills the air and visitors to Claud delicately negotiate their way through a menu of lattes, espressos, cappuccinos and flat whites. Together with side orders of home-made cake, and, for that true taste of ‘la belle france’, little madeleines fresh from our Willow Vale oven. Tom ‘Yapp’ takes a break to talk cycling with Lee. Turns out they had both climbed Mont Ventoux in the ferocious heat of Le Tour d’Etape, an amateur stage of the Tour de France, two years back.
As the sun sets over the fountain the last of the bin-enders stagger out of the Yapp Brother’s cellars clutching boxes of fine wines and head for home. We send out a last-minute plate of brownies to staff and are delighted when Tom returns the compliment with an elegant glass of deep red dessert wine that verges on ambrosial. ‘It goes with chocolate,’ he explains. Oh yes it does…
I decide that French wine, sunshine, good company, coffee and cake make for a very fine day out indeed. A votre santé!
Being an inveterate fan of Citroën’s marvellous ‘cube utile’, or H-van, as well as a discerning coffee consumer I was chuffed to be invited to the launch of ‘Claud the Butler’(www.claudthebutler.co.uk) in my home town of Frome last weekend. Claud is the brainchild of Lee and Helen who are the next door neighbours of my friend the artist Chris Bucklow (www.chrisbucklow.com) and his family who offered up their well-appointed riverside garden for the occasion.
Claud has been lovingly kitted out to dispense coffee and cakes and (as my sons appreciated) hot chocolate. Lee and Helen designed Claud’s distinctive livery and elegant interior and he had a mechanical overhaul by H-van specialists ‘Le Cube Utile’ (www.hvan.co.uk) who also worked on a van for Rapha (www.rapha.co.uk) purveyors of the finest cycling apparel (and imbibers of Yapp wines – I digress).
I wasn’t disappointed. The sun shone. The coffee and cakes were delicious. Lee and Helen buttled busily and Claud looked terrific. He is a late model, made in 1980, so a year younger than our 1979 version. Apparently ’79 was the last year H-vans were made commercially, other than for the Army so the chances are that Claud did his Service Nationale – although I am now bound to receive an e-mail from an aficionado who knows otherwise.
Claud and Co. are going to be visiting cycling events, parties and festivals in the near future and we have managed to persuade them to come to our Bin End Wines sale next Saturday 26th March so do come and check him out. Wine, coffee, cake and tyre-kicking of the first order – it has the makings of a great day out!
The start of our trade event season for 2011 began this week with our hosting a stand at The Specialist Importers Trade Tasting event (SITT) 2011 in Manchester (Monday) and London (Wednesday). We have worked at this event for the past couple of years and watched it grow into an already much talked about interesting show for the smaller, specialist merchants in the UK wine trade.
The SITT acronym is an ironic one as a long day is spent on one’s feet tasting, chatting and advising a steady flow of guests including Sommeliers, Journalists, fellow wine merchants and consultants. There was certainly precious little time to sit!
Michael and Tom attended the Manchester event, which as a rule is a little quieter than the London one. Tom the hot footed it back to help Jason and I look after things in London at Vinopolis in the historic Borough market near London Bridge.
We always try to keep our wine selection fairly small and snappy, but equally try to reflect as much of our varied and wide-ranging portfolio as possible. This tasting provided a good opportunity to look at some of our 2009 vintages that are going to be firmly at the forefront of our 2011 list. The white wines were all particularly well received on the day (which may partly reflect the ambient temperature of a packed hall)!
I thought that our Condrieu Terroirs 2009 (100% Viognier) from Francis Merlin was an excellent wine; good body, with lots of that AC typical minerality that makes Viognier wines from this area so interesting and different. One of the comments from a journalist who tasted it on the day was that it was refreshing to try a Condrieu that actually tasted like Condrieu is meant to, which is something very different from Viognier found elsewhere in the wine world. A third of the assemblage is put into oak and this helps carry the complex flavours through to a long and satisfying finish. This is a great early showing for the 2009 Rhône wines that we have been telling you about for the past couple of months.
Domaine Saparale Vin de Corse Sartène Rosé 2009 (Nielluccio, Sciacarello and Vermentino) is a stand out rosé wine. From sun-blessed Corsica, it has a lovely pale Salmon colour with lots of mouth-filling summer fruit flavours as well as crisp, slightly savoury tinge. This is Spring/Summer drinking out on the terrace with a salad or some seafood.
All of the reds that we had on show are firm favourites of mine and I am really pleased that our Pascal Frères Gigondas 1999 was well received by people on the day. Gigondas is generally a younger, more rustic cousin to the refined, maturity of good Châteauneuf du Pape and it is not often that you can find it available with any decent age. We are fortunate to have a long standing working relationship with Yves Cheron and he continually delights with his late release of these great value wines. Don’t get me wrong, this Gigondas does not have the rich complexity of good Châteauneuf, but to be fair it also does not have the price tag! Beautiful autumnal flavours expand on the palate, the rusticity of youth has been mellowed with age into a smooth, warming wine. Plenty of classic cigar box aromas and long finish, make this a wine for slow, relaxed contemplation. A great value wine in my opinion.
Overall, it was another successful event, lots of interesting wines on show and a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and new. When the doors finally closed after a busy day dispensing wine, we continued the long standing wine trade tradition and swapped the grape for the grain with a quick refreshing beer from the nearest market tavern, albeit though, still no seat to be had.
