Faced with an interminable crawl back to Frankfurt, a pit stop at ‘zum jug’ sounded like a good idea. Did it matter that we had no reservation, that unbeknown to us this was the second day of the Rheingau Gourmet and Wine Festival or even that we were wearing jeans from Mr Price? Not at all.
The youngest diners in the restaurant by a generation or two (and undoubtedly the poorest by an even larger margin), we were ushered into a wooden-clad inner sanctum complete with quasi-religious statues of St Vincent bearing a bunch of grapes by a band of waitress Valkyries. We were clearly in for some serious business if the heft of the wine list and the number of adjectives attached to each menu option was any indication.
With all the wines grown within spitting distance, the services of a good sommelier were not just nice to have, but essential. And this one certainly knew her Hock from her Riesling. She even had a favourable opinion of South African wine, having sampled an elegant Mont du Toit red blend on the island of Sylt in the North Sea. We started with a 2002 from Georg Breuer with a delicious concentration to match the home-cured Lachs and then moved on to something a touch sweeter from Winckelmann for the calf’s liver.
The gift of a place like Zum Krug is making accidental connoisseurs out of refugees from a storm. In this age of pretentious gastronomic twaddle, with every jus now a foam and different shaped Riedels for sparkling and still water, this is the best kind of connoisseur to be.
Genuine ones
‘But the bitch keeps bitching snitcher keeps snitching dropping names and telephone numbers and all … ’
(M. Jagger and K. Richards, Little T&A)
As I had already written a story for the Sunday Times throwing some question marks at the inaugural Tasting Academy announced by WINE magazine in 2007, which offered ‘certificates of competency’ to successful punters, it would have been hypocritical of me to refuse when invited to attend. Although the bill for R3,990 that followed confirmed that this academy was no laughing matter.
The highlight turned out to be the UK wine identity imported first class to give the affair some mega gravitas. Robert Parker described Bristol wine merchant Bill Baker as ‘a small and jealous person who should consider selling refrigerators’. Rick Stein’s popular BBC food programme, ‘Food Heroes’, was bombarded with hate mail aimed at Bill after he suggested Rick add some wheels and a motor to Chalky when his beloved dog died.
Baker was a wine merchant from Bristol and consultant to Terence Conran’s international stable of restaurants one of the sharpest palates in the business. Bill put together the first wine list for Bibendum and the Conran stable has grown like Topsy and now consists of 23 restaurants in London, three in Copenhagen and one in New York.
This Conran connection saves Bill from being regarded as a country hick wine merchant and he is shown (translation: gets to taste) all the important imports into the UK, the largest market for imported wine in the world.
A larger-than-life Falstaffian character with an infectious laugh, Bill was star instructor at the Tasting Academy. Most of the time, his opinion agreed with perceived South African wisdom, with the embarrassing exception of a Chenin Blanc, awarded five stars by the magazine two days before. Bill left it out of the medals, commenting, ‘the acidity is all over the place. It won’t keep’. But then his benchmark was the Loire. Which perhaps explains why Chenin is such a hard sell in Blighty, with different criteria clearly in play.
The Baker passion for food and wine was kindled at Peterhouse, Cambridge, while he was studying history of art:
‘The dean of my college, a priest, had done someone a favour and had been given “a special bottle” of wine – which turned out to be a Château Latour ’61. He invited a couple of us to taste it after dinner and I was blown away. I couldn’t believe that something could be that powerful and that complex.’
A career as wine merchant at Reid Wines in the West Country followed, a fortunate choice, as UK wine consumption was on the brink of a hedonistic explosion, rather like that bottle of Latour thirty years ago. Explains Bill:
‘There’s been a huge change of lifestyle in the UK and dining out in restaurants has replaced drinking in pubs. Many pubs are turning into gastro-pubs and people are going out more and spending more money. There has been a huge rise in awareness around good food and wine.
‘Twenty years ago the food was crap, but now you can find good food at every price level and the natural bev for food is wine. The rise and rise of rosé is a good example. Drinking rosé is seen as being sophisticated and the Bridget Jones’s Diary thing had a huge effect on Chardonnay sales.’
While 85 per cent of the UK wine retail market is covered by supermarkets and bottle store chains, Bill notes that independent merchants offering something special are on the rise. Indeed, the only way to survive, he says, ‘is to offer things the supermarkets don’t have’.
Bill was surprised to hear that South African sales to the UK had fallen sharply, down 18 per cent on the previous year:
‘Out in the countryside, people are very well disposed towards South Africa. In fact they’d much rather order a bottle of South African wine than French because they hate the French so much. At the entry level, prices of South African wines are slightly too high – the favourable rand/pound exchange rate often doesn’t get translated into value in the bottle. You need the quality of Jacob’s Creek at a similar price point to get people started buying South African on the quality ladder. But in the £5–£11 category, which we concentrate on, the quality of South African wine is extremely good and we have several South African wines on our list.’
Which includes examples from Thelema, Vergelegen, Warwick and Neil Ellis in the mid price range to the cult Columella Shiraz of Eben Sadie at £32.50 at the top. The list also contains a number of surprises:
‘At the entry level we have some really good value Pinotage from Porterville – we usually buy either their Shiraz or Pinotage, depending on quality, and sometimes we buy both. Every restaurant wine list should include at least one South African Pinotage, but while there are some really good ones, there are also some shockers.
‘Syrah is your most exciting varietal and I think it finds very good flavour expression here. The grapes have lovely spice and are better than many a Crozes Hermitage from France. Wine from Vergelegen and Sadie Family Vineyards are world class.’
On the subject of competition to South Africa in the all-important UK market, Bill supplies some insights:
‘Australia hasn’t shot its bolt. They’ve had a couple of serious blows, with the current drought a major problem. They can’t make wine as they’ve got no water, but don’t write them off. The real excitement is going to come from South America. They’re still struggling under a flood of bad wine but some excitement and value is starting to emerge.’
Americans – like Robert Parker and Wine Spectator magazine – have totally messed up Bordeaux for Bill, ‘although the French are starting to fight back’. In an attempt to garner high Parker scores, many Bordeaux producers changed their style to more fruit expression and higher alcohols. The popularity of these wines in the United States pushed prices off the scale, ‘a fate which is currently happening to top-end champagne and Madeira’, laments Bill. ‘But wine is so global now, it’s possible to find something interesting to drink at all price points. The trick is to be satisfied with the level of wine you can afford. It may not be Latour, but there are plenty of second labels of French first growths around which can give huge pleasure at the £14–£16 price point.’
Bill’s bibulous future is more of the same: tasting and trading ‘until I finish paying