5 minute read
Drink Bill Knott
Nellie Melba? In 50 years, our grandchildren could be ordering a Rusk à la Morrissey in a (Barry) White sauce.
While in Edinburgh, I thought I’d look up my token Scottish friend, Fergus. Things are tough across the border: his cellar is down to its last 3,000 bottles and he has only 312 days of shooting this year. After the dinner he cooked on an open fire, I thought the least I could do was to enliven his diet of defrosted elk by taking him back to Auld Reekie for lunch.
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Fergus eschews the luxury that is petrol. So we were forced to take the Tesla, which his delightful children had charged overnight on the farm treadmill. We parked in Aldi to subsidise his rum punches on Mustique, and wandered down to Fishers, the star of Leith’s quay restaurants. Edinburgh has become my favourite British city: the space, the hills, the New Town. And I do dare say it … the Englishness of it all. If only they could eliminate half the tartan and shortbread shops. There can’t be that many Japanese tourists claiming kinship with Highland clans.
Summer came early. So we sat outside watching the locals fill the pub terraces. Our two exceptional waitresses, who served us our salt-cod brandade, sea bass and Chablis, bathed us in warmth and hope. Edinburgh service is the best in the land. In addition to the nurturing, Miss Jean Brodie accents there seems to be a genuine auld-lang-syne belief in welcoming strangers, even Sassenachs. Empowered, Fergus and I waved goodbye – but only after he had plundered Aldi for some reduced-price, possibly vegan WD40.
Fishers Leith, 1 The Shore, Edinburgh EH6 6QW; tel: 0131 554 5666; two courses: £30; www.fishersrestaurants.co.uk
Mildreds, 45 Lexington Street, London W1F 9AN; also Camden, Dalston and King’s Cross; tel: 020 7494 1634; mains: £13; www.mildreds.co.uk
DRINK BILL KNOTT HIC! HACK’S HOCK
What happened to hock and Moselle?
In Raymond Postgate’s The Plain Man’s Guide to Wine (the 1960 vintage), the author – ‘not to be mincing about it’ – declares that the best of these ‘Rhenish’ wines ‘are the finest white wines in the world’, with ‘an astonishing floral bouquet, which is unparalleled’.
He spends five pages extolling their virtues before mentioning Riesling, and then in relation to the wines of Alsace, ‘still most usually marketed under the names of their grapes’. Alsace rather stole a march on the rest of the Old World in putting the grape variety on the label.
Whatever the reason – perhaps it was the tidal wave of Liebfraumilch that engulfed Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, alienating serious wine-lovers – our historic penchant for the finest wines of the Rhine and the Mosel has dwindled alarmingly over the last few decades.
Our attitude to sweetness in food and drink has always puzzled me. Crab, fresh peas or beans, strawberries, tomatoes, peaches, even lamb: describe any of these as ‘sweet’ and it is a term of approbation. Not with wine; not any more.
But, as David Motion, owner of The Winery in Maida Vale, proved to me over a recent lunch, German Rieslings do not have to be sweet, or even ‘off-dry’, the modern euphemism for ‘medium’. David is a man on a mission. A former pop producer who still dabbles as a composer, he took over the Winery in 1998, started importing wines directly from Germany and has been selling a higher and higher proportion of dry – trocken – wines ever since.
David’s best-selling Riesling is made by Gerrit Walter, who was an intern at The Winery in 2009. His Walter Riesling Trocken 2019 (£10.99) is a great introduction to the joys of dry Riesling. Grown on vertiginous terraces beside the Moselle, its racy, green apple acidity has a hint of slate from the local soils.
Other favourites – it was a long lunch – included Christine Huff’s intense and complex Rabenturm [Ravens’ Tower] 2011 from Rheinhessen; the ornatelylabelled Victoriaberg Hochheimer 2020 from Joachim Flick, which celebrates Queen Victoria’s love of hock and her visit to one vineyard in particular; and J B Becker’s gloriously honeyed – but still bone-dry – Riesling Spätlese 1998.
Lunch also demonstrated that Riesling is the finest of food-friendly wines, matching happily with langoustines, vitello tonnato and pasta with truffles.
The Winery is a sweetshop for grown-ups, one in which most of the sugar has been turned to alcohol. Should you not be able to visit, they will happily take phone orders and deliver to your door. David is a genial evangelist whose shop is a little cathedral, a shrine to a style of wine that we used to love and will, I hope, love again.
Reaching for the bookshelf, I will leave the last word to the great John Arlott. He wrote, in 1982, that ‘a good hock is never better than when it is drunk, reflectively, relaxedly, and most happy in the open air of a summer evening’.
The Winery, 4 Clifton Road, London W9; tel: 020 7286 6475; www.thewineryuk.com
Wine
This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a terrific fizz from Catalunya; a dry white that demonstrates how good Sicilian wines can be; and a Gamay from Burgundy that, for the price, compares very favourably with Pinot Noir. However, if you wish, you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Cava Brut Reserva, Bodgeas Sumarroca, DO Cava, Spain 2018, offer price £12.49, case price £149.88
Classic, bone-dry, vintage cava with nice weight and length. Knocks spots off cheap Champagne.
Fabrizio Vella Catarratto Organico, Terre Siciliane, Italy 2020, offer price £8.75, case price
£105.00 Crisp, delicious, grapefruittinged white in the modern Sicilian style. Terrific value.
Côteaux Bourguignons, Albert Fontaine, France 2020, offer price £9.99, case price
£119.88 Summer red that takes a slight chill very well: 100 per cent Gamay with bags of ripe cherry fruit.
