Bars & Pubs

I like wine – often in copious quantities. I just don’t know anything about it. While I’m immensely discerning in my choice of lager, I just can’t decipher the code on a wine’s label – although I am a fan of the ‘three for the price of two’ variety. So wine expert Joe Wadsack had a job on his hands: to distill decades of knowledge into tips that I would remember once the booze had worn off. When I winced at the dry sherry at our first venue, he realised he had his work cut out…
Feature continues

Follow Alan and Joe's wine tour of London

Be adventurous
‘The closest analogy to wine is cheese, because there’s about as much variety,’ Joe explains. ‘At Borough Market, people will try a sample of a cheese that looks like roadkill that’s been baked in the sunshine for four years and then pissed on – if they don’t like it, big deal. With wine, they’ll say “Can I just have a shiraz?” So open your mind.’

Drink with food
‘Lots of wines that aren’t popular with British consumers just need the right food and they’ll taste ten times better,’ says Joe, alluding to our tendency to drink vast quantities without so much as a pork scratching. ‘Matching food and wine isn’t about the wine making the food taste good or vice versa: the combination should taste better than either of the component parts.’

Learn geography
Some people use the provenance of wine as a short-cut to thinking about how wines taste, so while the white wines of central Spain have a taste some think is reminiscent of the lemons and pears cultivated there, those made in the warmer south taste more tropical. English wines, Wadsack says dismissively (and slightly unfairly), all taste of apples, because that’s what we grow.
‘People wrongly attach those characteristics to grape varieties, but actually the same variety will taste different when grown in different places.’ So you can have a decent stab at predicting what whiffs and tastes you’ll get from knowing where a wine’s from – useful when buying, and a neat dinner-party trick.

Match food by region
‘Burgundy goes perfectly with local dishes such as coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon. A good Chianti works with Tuscan food. And nothing goes better with cheddar cheese than scrumpy.’ Which is a big improvement on the ‘red with meat, white with fish’ system.

Drink white with green
Suddenly, we lurch into chemistry. ‘Sauvignon grapes contain chemicals called methoxypyrazines,’ says Joe. ‘It’s a nettley smell and taste – a green-ness. It makes asparagus taste like asparagus. We don’t actually like it on its own, but alongside other tastes it adds a freshness and a tang. So sauvignon blanc goes with foods that also have methoxypyrazine in them: vine tomatoes, green peppers.’ So there’s no need to dredge up my hazy recollections of GCSE science: this tip is more about an idea of what ‘green’ tastes like. Which is a relief.

Ignore the wine snobs
I attempt to mimic Joe’s tasting routine: putting most of his face into the glass for a sniff and sucking in air over his mouthful of wine. This merely results in rosé dribbling down my chin. ‘Don’t worry about tasting the ‘right’ way,’ Joe reassures me. ‘And ditto describing wine. “It tastes like a runner moonwalking through a field of sunflowers” – What does that mean?’ Dribbling isn’t a problem either: ‘There’s a reason wine tasters don’t wear white shirts.’

Start at the extremes
Given that he started me off with a hardcore fino (dry) sherry, Joe’s advice seems to be: run before you can walk. ‘People often begin with what they know and build outwards. That takes too long. If you move from New Zealand chardonnays to South African or Australian, it’ll take you a lifetime to reach Burgundy.’ But get there and you won’t go back. My most surprising taste experience of the day comes when, after a tough series of challenging whites, sherries and French reds, I am allowed an Australian shiraz. What should be within my comfort zone now tastes like washing thick jam down with Tizer.

Buy screwcaps
‘More than 10 per cent of wine that isn’t screw-capped is corked. New Zealanders demand screwcaps, because corks are shipped there in large batches and a single tainted one can affect all the others.’ While relieved that my twist-open bottles don’t make me a total pleb, I still feel guests merit a cork. ‘That’s why restaurants don’t stock screwcaps,’ says Joe. ‘Wine waiters are embarrassed to come over to your table and just twist open a bottle. And then ask for a tip.’

If you can’t pronounce it, buy it
Supermarket wine buyers are under pressure to get in bottles that will sell, and the British don’t like weird labels, unusual countries or names that are hard to say. So, Joe says as we lurch off to our homes, ‘If you spot an unpronounceable wine, from a place you’ve never heard of, in an ugly bottle, the wine buyer had a damn good reason for insisting it go there. It could be brilliant. So try it.’

Follow Alan and Joe's wine tour of London