Wine bars year zero

Were old fashioned wine bars really so intimidating?

The wine bar is back according to an article in Observer Food Monthly last weekend. It’s a perennial topic. Historian Giles MacDonogh quipped that he’d pitched a similar article to the Financial Times 20 years ago. About ten years ago I wrote in Food & Wine magazine: “Today, wine bars are fashionable. There’s even been talk that wine itself might be… *whisper it* cool”. The opening of Noble Rot in Lambs Conduit Street, which has gone on to be a small chain of enormously popular wine bars, spawned dozens of such articles. 

The difference this time is that many of the new openings are outside London especially in newly fashionable seaside towns like Margate or Folkestone. The author of the Observer piece Tomé Morrissy-Swan (henceforth called TMS) writes:  “The new wine bar is more approachable than its predecessors, once redolent of insurance brokers in dark, cavernous buildings downing full-bodied claret.” Perhaps he’s thinking of Vino in Fleet Street which notoriously didn't allow women at the bar until 1982. 

Most places, however, weren’t like this. Andrew Barr in his Drink: A social history records that wine bars that appeared all over Britain in the '60s and ‘70s were designed specifically to appeal to women. At a time when many if not most pubs were male-dominated spaces, wine bars provided a place where women could have a drink without being hit on. They were essentially pubs with wine. They also did food at a time when most pubs didn’t. As pub food and wine improved in the ‘80s and ‘90s and such places began to die out. The gastro pub killed the wine bar.

But some still survive. If you want to see what an old fashioned wine bar is like head to Le Beaujolais just off the Charing Cross Road. It has the feel of a pub but with wine and French food. It’s not a place to pontificate about biodynamics and certainly doesn’t have anything so grand as a sommelier. You just order a glass of beaujolais, maybe some cheese and bread and soak up the gloriously louche atmosphere. It couldn’t be less intimidating. Alice Lascelles captures the atmosphere in the FT a couple of years ago:

The Francophile wine list is short and proudly traditional, with lots of unpretentious village wines and vins du pays, and good-value bottles by well-respected big names. It tilts towards burgundy and beaujolais – if you’re serious about getting to know your beaujolais terroirs, they’ve got all 10 cru wines by benchmark producer Henry Fessy.  My friend and I squeezed in between two silver tops talking cricket, and a table of young women in eyeliner and berets, and ordered a very nice 2015 Albert Bichot Pinot Noir and vast plate of cheese. As the wine went down and the noise levels rose, I felt a growing sense of bonhomie – by the time I left, I wanted for nothing except a lit Gauloise.

Old school wine bars are fun! There are still dozens of these places around the country like Woods in Dulverton, Somerset or Curious Wine Cellar in Northleach which are at the heart of their communities. At the latter when I visited last year there was a group of workmen at one table drinking lager and eating crisps while some smartly-dressed ladies of a certain age sat nearby getting stuck into the rosé. Though there may have been a man in red trousers there as well, it is in the Cotswolds after all. In the Kent town where I live we have three wine bars. One of them, Vino, is run by an Italian wine enthusiast¹ so you could have a discussion about silky tannins but most people don’t. The other two offer straightforward wine like Picpoul or Rioja and function as sort of cafe/ pubs. 

One of the big differences between these places which don’t get write ups in the Observer and the places that do is natural wine (though not all the venues TMS talks to are). The article quotes natural wine fundamentalist Aaron Ayscough: “The good wine bars in the UK are very influenced by Paris.”

The article continues: “what unites them is a mission to shed wine’s intimidating image.” My feelings about natural wine are mixed, something for another post, but one thing it certainly isn’t is unintimidating. I remember going to Winemakers in Deptford High Street (now closed) and being utterly baffled by the list. There was not a wine or producer I recognised and the waiter despite our best efforts didn’t seem interested in deciphering it to us. I ended up with a heavily volatile kadarka from Hungary. A similar thing happened at the legendary Terroirs (also closed) near Trafalgar Square when I ordered a glass of Morgon and wondered whether it was as mean to taste like that. TMS writes of one place: “the server explaining Sicilian natural wines to a table of octogenarians.” Now this sounds fun, but you can see why a wine that needs explaining might be off-putting. 

Selling natural wine requires well-trained and extremely enthusiastic staff. People see this as a bug but it’s actually a feature. Wine was getting too straightforward thanks to writers and presenters like Jane MacQuitty, Oz Clarke and Jilly Goolden plus supermarkets, chains like Oddbins and, yes, the first wave of wine bars. Natural wine was a great way of remystifying it and giving power back to the gatekeepers, to use a fashionable term. Left to their own devices, people tend to go for old favourites like malbec, Chablis or New Zealand sauvignon blanc as I discovered in 2017 when I worked briefly in a wine shop/bar in Chislehurst, south east London.

If you read the recent Observer article, or indeed gone on wine Instagram, having just landed from outer space, you’d imagine that wine was some sort of esoteric pursuit in Britain, like sake appreciation or bondage, rather than the most popular drink in the country, enjoyed every day by millions. There seems to be a year zero approach to the subject in much of the media, as if before 2018 wine was all men in red trousers and old school ties pontificating about Port. It must be extremely irritating for people like Victoria Moore at the Daily Telegraph or Fiona Beckett at the Guardian and their predecessors who have been making a complicated subject accessible for years. 

But I suppose the ongoing struggle against elitism in all its forms (still so much to do!) sells papers or gets clicks. And if it gets people into these places, then that’s not a bad thing. I’d be delighted to have a trendy wine bar in Faversham not least because the food in such places tends to be excellent. Much better than the wine bars of old. And I’d very much enjoy trying to find something drinkable off the list. 

1. An enthusiast who has as a Sommelier Diploma, a WSET Level 3 and 35 years in wine and hospitality. So now you know.