the burnnig question

BA is on the hunt for a new MW

Bosses at British Airways are turning to fine wine to get the beleaguered airline through the turbulence of the pandemic.

Until 2010, BA employed top wine writer Jancis Robinson as its consultant. But she resigned after the airline’s then boss, Willie Walsh, cut costs by appointing a single supplier for the airline’s three cabin classes.

The flag carrier, which has faced criticism over plans to make passengers order food and drink from an app, is recruiting another Master of Wine in an effort to lift its game.

Daily Mail, December 4

Mega winery faces local opposition

Plans for Britain’s biggest winery have been put on hold over concerns about traffic – and badgers.

An almost three-hour planning committee meeting was held at Medway Council in Kent to determine the fate of a proposal to build what would be Britain’s biggest winery and visitor centre.

This vast, and contemporary, £30m project – named Kentish Wine Vault – would be built on green belt land located in a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, surrounding the small village of Cuxton, on the North Downs.

Many councillors were concerned over the impact of the winery’s visitor centre.

wine-searcher.com, December 11

?THE BURNING QUESTION

How good or bad are you finding the service from couriers right now?

�I think on the whole the couriers have been fairly decent. I get on well with the local guys but ones who are not familiar with the area can often be intimidating and stressful. That’s all probably down to them being under pressure. ‘Fragile and handle with care’ means absolutely nothing and you have to have extreme protection afforded to any packages. Our main courier is good on the phone and email so when things do go wrong we do have someone we can at least sort it with.”

Alan Irvine The Scottish Gantry, Milngavie & Stirling

�We didn’t realise that the greatest bane of our lives would be sending things and it not arriving in one piece. We were so excited when we sent out our first order. We’d lovingly boxed it up and handed it over to the smiley collection guy and it was never seen again. That was our wake-up call. Every time a box goes out we cross ourselves like Catholics and just hope it’s going to make it. We changed couriers three times during our first year.” Alex Griem H Champagne winner H

Chilled & Tannin, Cardiff

�We had a situation yesterday where the courier had a breakage and for some reason they managed to return it to a private individual, who isn’t even a customer. So this 85-year-old lady received this breakage and it leaked all over her floor. It’s one thing to break the wine but to send the return to a completely random person – it’s just bizarre. Most of the time things are OK, but I think they are all under pressure and they don’t have enough staff.”

Francis Peel Whitebridge Wines, Stone, Staffordshire

�We work with Parcelforce and they’ve been brilliant. There’s a members’ forum on the Vindies website and I think the consensus was that Parcelforce was the most reliable. We use the three-stage pulp packaging, you could almost drop it from 20 feet and the bottles would be fine. I think if you get the packaging right, you’re halfway there. We don’t label it with our company logo so it’s not blindingly obvious that it’s a box of booze.”

Simon Hill The Artisan Wine & Spirits Co, Salisbury

Champagne Gosset The oldest wine house in Champagne: Äy 1584

The beauty of Bairrada

This captivating region of central Portugal, where artisanal winemakers benefit from the cooling influence of the Atlantic, is a natural partner for independent merchants

If you were to build, from scratch, the ideal wine region to match the needs and likes of the UK’s independent wine merchants, you’d be hard pushed to come up with something that fits the brief better than Bairrada in central Portugal.

This, after all, is a place of smallscale, artisanal production, with a long tradition of winemaking, based on a mix of distinctive local and judiciously chosen national and international grape varieties.

It’s also charming: a patchwork of fascinatingly fragmented vineyards set among a picturesque concentration of woods and family-owned farms as the region moves away from the coast and up into gently rolling hills.

More importantly, this relatively narrow strip of the wider Beira Atlântico area has the ideal conditions for producing wines that balance ripeness of fruit with trademark cut and freshness. In Bairrada, the southern European sun is moderated by the cooling influence of the Atlantic Ocean just a few short miles away in what is a decidedly mild, maritime climate.

Those conditions have made Bairrada a magnet in recent years for some of Portugal’s finest and most creative winemakers, people with stories to tell about a region that is equally adept at producing grapes for youthful and ageworthy reds, for scintillatingly balanced whites and for Portugal’s best and most historic sparkling wines.

From Baga to Bical

That Bairrada remains slightly under the radar in the UK only adds to the appeal; it’s ripe for discovery by adventurous wine consumers looking for something new and different.

Certainly, Bairrada’s prime red grape variety, the captivatingly distinctive Baga, is perfectly cast for cult status. There’s something of Nebbiolo’s combination of aromatic prettiness and grand architectural structure (firm tannins and a spine of acidity) in the region’s best traditional Baga red wines, grown on clay-limestone soils. Robustly structured but elegant, they are capable of long ageing, taking on ever more exotic and complex scents of honey, spices, incense and woodsmoke once they get to 10 years old or more.

These characteristics make for great food wines: aged Baga with leitão, the local speciality of melt-in-the-mouth, crisp-skinned roast suckling pig, is one of the world’s classic regional food and wine combinations.

Baga is complemented on the red side by Portuguese grapes Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz and Aragonez as well as international Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah, all of which have adapted well to the local conditions and are permitted by the DOC

Bairrada has become a magnet for some of Portugal’s finest and most creative winemakers

Bairrada rules. It’s a similar situation with whites. The traditional Bairrada white is a blend, based on a local quartet of Arinto, Bical, Cercial and Maria Gomes, and sometimes complemented by Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.

Whether it’s youthful, early- and easydrinking aromatic, or something more serious, mineral, pithy and long-lived, these white blends are every bit as singular as Bairrada’s reds, the combination of varieties, climate and terroir coming together to provide wines with a beguilingly natural spine of acidity.

That’s true of the sparkling wines, too. The first Portuguese region to make a traditional-method sparkling wine back in 1880, Bairrada remains Portugal’s standout producer of quality fizz, accounting for around two-thirds of the country’s total annual production of bubbles.

Here too there’s stylistic variety: Bairrada sparkling can be citrussy fresh and direct, or more aromatically pretty and floral. It can even be red.

But, like everything in Bairrada, it’s always marked by the streak of Atlantic freshness that has made the region one of European wine’s rising stars – and a perfect match for the UK’s independent wine retailing scene.

A basket of Bairrada wines

Aplauso White Bairrada DOC Brut 2016 (Amathus, RRP £15) A three-way blend of Baga, Touriga Nacional and Pinot Noir, this characterful Bairrada Blanc de Noirs is lithe and lively and bright with appealing soft mousse and flavours of crisp apple and lemon zest, leading to a savoury-spicy ginger-biscuit finish.

Vadio Bairrada Branco 2020 (Bibendum, RRP £13.95) A classic blend of Bical and Cercial grown on a mix of sandy and clay-limestone soils, this tightly coiled dry white is full of latent energy and verve, the steely acidity providing the backbone for pithy lime and lemon and some salty seasoning on the finish.

Luis Pato Vinhas Velhas Bairrada Branco 2020 (Raymond Reynolds, RRP £16.49) The latest vintage of star winemaker Luis Pato’s justly celebrated old-vine blend of Bical with Cercial and Sercialinho is a kind of Atlantic answer to great dry Riesling, all tensile steely acidity, rocky minerals and dancing Cox’s apple and grapefruit tang. Delicious now, but built to last. Niepoort Drink Me Natcool Bairrada 2020 (Raymond Reynolds, RRP £17.50) From the ever-restless, everinnovative Dirk Niepoort’s Bairrada outpost Quinta de Baixo, a 100% Baga that aims for pure drinkability and elegance and doesn’t miss. Light (12%) in alcohol, crisp in acidity, it’s bursting with just-picked raspberry and cherry and sappy ripe tannin.

Aliança Bairrada Reserva 2018 (Boutinot, RRP £8.95) 70% Baga supplemented with Tinta Roriz and Touriga Nacional, this is aged in stainless steel to better present its fruit-burst of inky blackberries and touch of figgy sweetness, nicely contrasted with the tang and chew of plum skins and just enough tannic grip to keep things red-meat friendly.

Marqués de Marialva Colheita Selecionada Bairrada 2018 (Seeking distribution, RRP £10.99) There’s lots of sweet jammy fruit in this crowd-pleasing, warming red blend of 50% Baga with 30% Aragonez and 20% Touriga Nacional, while the plentiful tannins are well-managed and soft after six months in used French oak, with lively acidity balancing the cherry bakewell finish.

Arco Dâ Agieira Bairrada 2016 (Portugalia, RRP £21.17) From the region’s north east, a different take on the Bairrada red, in which Touriga Nacional, grown on alluvial soils, takes the lead to sumptuous effect, the fruit perfectly ripe and fleshy without being fat, the ample tannins polished and fine, the Bairrada freshness shining through.

Don’t judge a wine by its label. But looks do matter

There’s a reason why so many independent wine merchants seem to fill their shelves with good-looking bottles. David Williams learns some facts of retailing life in the company of some old hands

Iam a firm believer in the value of blind tastings. In my view, tasting without knowing the producer (vintage and region are another matter) is the only way to really be sure that nothing extraneous gets in the way of judging a wine’s quality – the only way to keep out prejudice based on reputation, whether the sentiment you bring with you is negative or overly reverential.

A week spent tasting with a group of independent merchants on a Wine Merchant trip to the Loire at the end of last year, however, reminded me that there are limits to blind tasting, that there are other factors involved in testing a wine’s worth as a commercial entity, and that no successful wine survives on the quality of the liquid alone.

I have some sense of this already, of course. I’m not completely naive. All the same it was striking how much interest my companions in the Loire took in the way the wines looked – a quality and intensity of attention to labels and bottles that you just don’t find when you’re tasting, as I almost always tend to do, with producers, journalists, or even sommeliers.

Indeed, for many of my press colleagues, a fixation on labels is just not the done thing. Any discussion of packaging beyond a brief aside is liable to provoke under-thebreath muttering about books, covers and philistines: it’s the definition of superficial. To which any merchant would be justified in responding with a roll of the eye and an invitation to spend a day in a shop where the realities of how wines make their way from shelf to purchase soon make themselves

apparent. Listening to the group of merchants in the Loire dissect – sometimes rather ruthlessly – the worth of each label as we tasted that week was all the more fascinating since I felt so under-qualified to join in.

Clearly there’s more to it than simply liking the picture, or the layout, the colour or the font. There are judgement calls to be made on what consumers want from a wine label at a given price, or style or region. Even I am able to sense that the funky illustration and loud colours that might work, craft-ale style, with a glouglou pet nat are just not going to work on a Burgundy grand cru. But I’d be much less confident in asserting what would be effective for all the many gradations of style in between those two stylistic extremities.

My own instincts with packaging are almost entirely emotional, I’ve come to realise, based on a mix of nostalgia and years of conditioning about what makes a fine wine label and, therefore, not a little conservative. I like my fine wine labels as traditional as possible: the Germans should be fluted and filled with gothic script and elaborate fine-point illustrations in gold, black and green; I feel a little shortchanged and suspicious if my Bordeaux doesn’t have a château depicted; I respond powerfully to anything that comes with a bold 1920s or 1930s-style font.

For those producers who don’t have that kind of length of service, but are charging more than £20, I don’t want faux-retro, I want something coolly, minimally modern.

Under £20, it’s much more that anything goes, so long as I like it. I am, in other words, a fairly typical wine consumer.

The best merchants, however, are considerably more analytical about what works than me. Even when their judgements start to feel like instinct, it’s an instinct of experience and knowledge of their customers, what appeals to them, and what they are likely to pick up and buy.

But it’s also about wanting a shop to have an aesthetic. In any wine merchant wine bottles make up the majority of the wall space: they are, to all intents and purposes, the décor. A merchant can tolerate a few poorly designed aberrations if the wines are sufficiently good and/or well known.

But no matter how good the liquid inside may be, a new wine is never going to get a place on the shelves if it is dressed, as one of my companions in the Loire described one unfortunate bottle, “like a 1990s Powerpoint presentation” or a “Bulgarian wine from Tesco in 2007”. For one thing, it brings the overall look of the shop down. And if, by some miracle it gets chosen and taken out into the world, it’s also acting, indirectly, as an ambassador for your business, provoking awkward questions for your customers from their friends like “Where did that hideous bottle come from – Lidl?” Which, if nothing else, reminds us that there may still be value in blind tastings after all.

For many of my press colleagues, a fixation on labels is just not the done thing. Any discussion of packaging beyond a brief aside is liable to provoke under-thebreath muttering about books, covers and philistines: it’s the definition of superficial

Blind tastings remain the best way of assessing wines without prejudice

S P I C I N G T H I N GS U P

Fitz Spencer of Honky Tonk Wine Library has done a lot of thinking about the way he runs his business. It’s a process that has resulted in an exclusive-label rum, and plans for an entirely new division for the company. That’s before we even get started on podcasts, health products and fish.

Lots of independent merchants are intrigued by the potential of rum. Few are so invested in the category that they’re prepared to launch their own brand, but that’s exactly what Fitz Spencer has done.

Honky Tonk Plantation Spice Batch Rum is named after Honky Tonk Wine Library, the Plymouth shop and bar that Spencer established in 2018 with partner Zoe Brodie.

“I could have gone down the easy route and jumped on the gin bandwagon, but I’ve grown up with rum,” he says. “If it comes to spirits, my go-to would always be rum.

“Spiced rum is becoming very popular, especially in the UK. I wanted to do it in the old-school style, very flavoursome with spice.”

The company’s partner in the project is Devon Distillery. “We talked about the heritage of where the flavours were coming from,” says Spencer. “We did about 12 batches before we got to the base batch that we liked. Then it took us another three months of tweaking the flavours and spice and balancing out the alcohol and getting the recipe right.”

The initial order was 860 bottles, which sell on the shelves for £39.95. Other retailers can buy the rum for £24.15, if they order between one and five cases.

“It’s full of flavour to start off with, then you can taste the vanilla, then you get the spice kick – it is slightly spicier than most of them out there,” says Spencer.

“The perfect serve is over ice with a wedge of orange and when you have that orange zest hitting the spice, it really complements it. Failing that, I would say a splash of Coke or with ginger beer to give it that extra kick.

“My mixologist has come up with a

Fitz Spencer

cocktail bespoke to us and if that goes well, we might look at putting that out too.”

There are more launches in the pipeline, including a straight rum and a bourbon.

Lockdown provided Spencer with time to take stock of his trading model. “During that time, we’ve probably invested another £70,000 to £80,000 in the business and that doesn’t include the rum side, which was just shy of £9,000,” he says.

“The margins and exclusivity are part of the appeal of launching our own products, but it’s more about looking at our business model.

“Through lockdown we did pretty well with online sales. We spent £10,000 on an e-commerce site and the aim is to take the Honky Tonk brand into a different sector.

“I want to be able to develop separate businesses in the months to come, so we’ll have our own brands, plus niche brands that want to come into the UK. We don’t want to go heavy on the wine brands, but we’ll be looking more at spirits.”

The retail side of the company is also in a dynamic phase. “No longer can you just put wines on the shelves and open the doors,” says Spencer. “People want something different.

“Honky Tonk has moved from being a wine shop and deli to a wine shop, deli and restaurant.

“At the end of next year, we’ll take on the new building next door and that will be our deli shop and a fishmonger, butcher and a huge wine emporium.

“So all the retail side will be next door. People can still come into Honky Tonk to the wine library if they want to buy wine to take away after their meal. That will grow as a separate brand, and we’ll hopefully do another one of them.

“What we’ve found is that there are offshoots of different businesses that come from Honky Tonk.

“We can’t put our eggs in one basket. We had to diversify during lockdown: online, own brands, online tastings … we did everything to keep our heads above water, and we thought, ‘this is working’.

“We started with a podcast before lockdown. It was a bit like Desert Island Discs but talking about wine. We’re trying to get French and Saunders on.

“We’ve been so busy. I was mad enough to start another business on the health side of things too.

“We’ve got staff on the shop floor and Zoe and I are in the office most of the time running the business. Once or twice a week we are on the shop floor, but we are making sure we’re running the business rather than the business running us.”

We’ve probably invested another £70,000 to £80,000 in the business and that doesn’t include the rum, which was just shy of £9,000 “ THE WINE MERCHANT january 2022 29