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Wine of the week: Achard Vincent, Clairette de Die: an original sparkling wine, produced using the rare ‘Methode Ancestrale’, which is low in alcohol (7%). From Domaine Achard-Vincent in the southern end of the Rhone valley. Light, refreshing and grapey – ideal with fruit salad or fruity sorbet. Available (limited stock) from Earth food shop in Kentish Town Road, NW5, £9.90 |
Wine bottling out of the food revolution
As independent food producers enjoy increasing success in the capital, lovers of good wine are suffering from a global market approach
JUST a few years back Marylebone High Street was almost dead. Although at the heart of an affluent central London enclave, its retailers had little to offer the areas well-healed residents, who consequently shopped elsewhere.
Slowly a retail revolution has occurred and a succession of cutting-edge food shops and quality restaurants have arrived.
A farmers market sets up shop every Sunday. Among the stalls is Madame Gaultier, a French-style food stand, selling pâtés, oven-ready meals and other high class ready-to-eat slow foods.
These include steak with onion served in a roll and several elaborate casseroles, including cassoulet, a marvellous mixture of pork, lamb, sausage and duck immersed in a chunky bean sauce and topped with a crust of baked breadcrumbs.
Although French in most respects, the stall includes something very British – a long queue!
There is also a shop selling hundreds of different hand-made cheeses, many from British producers. Another offers enormous, handsome-looking pork pies and sausage rolls.
An enterprise called Biggles produces dozens of different varieties of sausages, all made by hand with real meat.
Newly arrived is Stara Polska, a Polish restaurant, proffering inexpensive authentic stews, soups and other dishes. Some are served inside a hollowed-out loaf of bread, baked in the shape of a lidded serving dish.
Sir Terence Conran has a deli near the Marylebone Road end, but it pales into insignificance when compared to The Natural Kitchen, an enterprise so ambitious that one is inclined to consider it a folly.
Spread over three large floors, the shop comprises an organic butcher, fishmonger, delicatessen, grocer, greengrocer and a dairy and bread shop, topped off with a licensed café.
It also sells wines, specialist books, DVDs and holds regular workshops. An army of enthusiastic assistants roam the floors, stacking shelves and answering questions.
The Marylebone High Street area rivals Borough Market as the centre of a food revolution that is beginning to sweep across London, improving food quality and enabling shoppers to educate themselves.
In these new shops and restaurants the producer does matter – he or she is respected as an expert with specialist, often regionally based, knowledge.
Diversity and originality are encouraged. Authenticity and quality are placed above price in order of importance. Simple products like yogurts, sausages and breads are made in the traditional manner using only the natural ingredients required and then given the necessary time to mature and develop.
How strange, then, that wine is going in the opposite direction.
Traditionally, wine was a simple product with an array of regional variations, each with its own style, taste and grape content. Currently, producers are guided into making the kind of wine market research companies and retail experts claim the wine-buying public want.
Traditional wine-making involved interplay between land, weather, grape variety and human expertise.
Special plots of land – often of poor farming quality – were revered for their ability to produce exceptional wines. Local knowledge was vitally important and vintage mattered. These ancient winemaking truths are dismissed as irrelevant today. Great wine, we are told, can come from anywhere.
Local knowledge and tradition is ignored in favour of technology and science.
The independent winemaker or blender has been superseded by a new generation of globetrotting scientifically savvy wine consultants, whose brief is to to ensure a reliable supply of consistent wine with an acceptable taste for the new global market.
Roll on the wine revolution. |
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