Wine tour of London

Wine expert Joe Wadsack takes Time Out’s Alan Rutter on a bacchanalian tour of London, sampling the best glasses costing around a fiver and nibbles to go with them

The wine and snack place: Salt Yard
They do great tapas here – which makes it an ideal place to match food and wine.

Palacio de Vivero 2007, with goats’ cheese This Spanish wine is made from two grape varieties: viura and verdejo. I can only stand goats’ cheese for a few seconds before it tastes like a little goat’s armpit; this is very acidic so it washes out the mouth. The same acidity works with oily foods, like the olives.

Gutierrez Colosia Fino with guindilla peppers Here, sherry is often thought of as a girly drink – but in Cadiz, it’s nine-foot dockers who drink it. Normally you think of a wine as being fruity; this one is bone dry. If you try it with the peppers, it brings the spicy, savoury taste into focus.

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Tinto Barrica Tempranillo 2006, with Joselito Gran Reserva Jamón Ibérico This wine tastes ordinary with oily foods but anything high in protein makes red wine taste smoother – it glues together all those chalky tannins. This ham is expensive because the pigs have to have two acres of free roaming land each and can eat only acorns. They eat until they can’t walk – the Caligula of animals – then they’re killed and the hams are hung for three years. Combined with the ham, this red tastes like the good Lord slipping down your throat in velvet pants.
Salt Yard, 54 Goodge St, W1 (020 7637 0657/www.saltyard.co.uk).

The small but perfectly stocked bar at St John

The wine restaurant: St John
The food menu changes here all the time – they don’t do huge runs of everything, so it’s all fresh. They serve wine in very ordinary glasses – even though they have claret for £650, they pour it into glasses that you’d get at school. But they work… Many of the wines are available by the glass. I like a place with a smaller list and staff that know to pour it away if it’s been sitting open too long. Turnover of wine and well-trained staff are far more important than trendiness or how many fancy bottles are on the list.

Domaine Boudau Le Clos Côtes du Roussillon 2006, with terrine This is from as close to the Spanish border as French wine gets. Now, it’s obvious that an apple in England is going to be more sour than one from the south of France. The closer you get to the equator, the lower the acidity and the higher the sugar – it’s the same for wines. The Côtes du Roussillon is almost pruney, but it has high levels of tannins, so goes perfectly with the terrine, which contains loads of protein.

Catherine & Pierre Breton Chinon Beaumont 2006 with Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese This is made nearly as far north of the equator as you can make wine – so it’s at the other end of the scale from the previous glass, even though both are French, and both are utterly unlike an Aussie shiraz (not that there’s anything wrong with Australian shiraz, though these days you have to pay a lot to get a good one). The Loire is a cheese region, so it makes sense that this is going to work with the hunk of Lancashire. Actually, this hard, dry, acidic wine would almost go better with a fattier cheese.

But it doesn’t matter if matches don’t always work perfectly. You have to take a punt and appreciate the extremes. Every time you try something weird and obscure you risk a complete disaster, but you don’t mind because the highs are so good.
St John, 26 St John St, EC1 (020 7251 0848/www.stjohnrestaurant.com).

Barrels of fun at Wine Wharf

The wine emporium: Wine Wharf
I never think of this as a restaurant – it’s just a great place to have a glass of wine, with little bits of food if you’re hungry (which we no longer are).

Château La Freynelle, Bordeaux 2005 Most rosés are a by-product of making red wine. If you squeeze red grapes, you get white liquid. To make a red wine you ferment the juice with the skins; the alcohol leaches the skin colour out into the liquid. If you do it for 24 hours, you get a rosé. If you leave the skins in for two weeks, you get red. This rosé is really bright, really fruity. Next to it, we’ll try our first big Australian red.

Willunga 100 Shiraz Viognier 2005 This is made about half an hour’s drive out of Adelaide. It’s got a real whiff of vanilla, praline even, from the oak barrels. It’s also got a lovely fruitiness, but after the other wines we’ve been drinking it’s really heavy and jammy. With a wine like this, food doesn’t fit into the equation: it’s like a dessert.
Wine Wharf, Stoney St, SE1 (020 7940 8335/www.winewharf.com).


The wine pub: The White Horse
What’s lovely here is that the menu gives you a beer and a wine match for every dish – great if you don’t know much about wine. They also run tutorials on beer and food matching.

Debating the finer points of reisling at The White Horse

Dr Loosen Blue Slate Riesling 2005 Riesling is, frankly, the world’s best white grape variety. Everyone’s got a downer on it because of Blue Nun and Black Tower in the 1970s, but those types of wine almost don’t exist any more. Thanks to changing tastes, improving technology and market competition, even Blue Nun is actually quite good these days. I was once at a wine tasting with Ernie Loosen, who’s one of the world’s most celebrated winemakers and looks like a cross between Ronnie Corbett and Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown. I asked him what kind of wine trellising he used in his vineyards. He said, ‘I put a stick in ze ground, and ze vine grows up it.’ Sometimes the experts can get too complicated.

People like sweet, fresh grapes, they drink sugary cocktails, but, for some reason, if you offer them a sweet wine they’ll assume it’s going to be shit. This is a summer’s day drink – crisp, like biting into an apple. It’s amazingly refreshing and it’s only 7.5 per cent alcohol – it goes with everything from salads to Chinese dishes.

Château Falfas Côtes de Bourg, Bordeaux 2002, and Katnook Founder’s Block 2004 Two entirely different cabernet sauvignons. The first is an Old World wine with an earthy, almost tarry smell that tastes very lean in comparison to the Australian. The French wine (at 12.5 per cent) would be better with food, but the Founder’s Block (a punchy 14 per cent) is a wine made to be drunk on its own. It’s not as jammy as the shiraz we had earlier; in fact it’s probably the very best Australian cabernet sauvignon there is for the price.
The White Horse, 1-3 Parsons Green, SW6 (020 7736 2115/www.whitehorsesw6.com).

'The heavy Aussie red or the fruity rosé...?'

The wine bar: Brinkley’s
This place is almost ridiculously reasonably priced – their house Champagne is great, and costs less than most supermarket bubbly. John Brinkley has seven or eight restaurants, and he has always operated on the principle that if you only charge a fiver or tenner on every bottle sold, you’ll sell more volume – and the place will be packed, so you’ll sell more food.

Domaines Ott Côtes de Provence 2006, (£16 for a half bottle) This is a very different rosé from the one we had earlier. That was bright red, this is a lot paler – in France, they’d call the colour ‘onion skin’. It smells like dried strawberries but isn’t really fruity when you drink it. It almost tastes of honey and hay, and is very low in acidity. A lot of people would worry this wine was tired: they’d want a fresher one, a 2007 or, from the New World, a 2008. It’s not lip-smacking, there’s no sherbet tang. But it’s almost like saké, and goes amazingly with dried sausage, smoked salmon or oysters.

I love this place. You can drink great wine in Brinkley’s for less than the price of going to the pub – I’ve probably spent more money on wine here than in any other bar in London. And that, as you may have gathered, is saying something.
Brinkley’s, 47 Hollywood Rd, SW10 (020 7351 1683/www.brinkleys.com).





Feature by Joe Wadsack. Photography Scott Wishart