The grapes travel and the wine is made in a warehouse, and that is how it has always worked
Renegade Wine Bar holds a 4.8 from three hundred and fifty-one people, charges twenty to fifty pounds, and it is an urban winery.
They make the wine here. In a warehouse. In London.
And it sounds like a gimmick, and it is not.
The grapes travel
Which is the whole argument, and it is a serious one.
Because there is no law of nature requiring wine to be made next to the vineyard.
And it very frequently is not. Enormous quantities of wine are made in facilities miles from where the fruit was grown – and grapes are transported, chilled, in bulk, as a matter of routine.
Why it works
Because the thing that determines a wine is the fruit – the site, the soil, the slope, the weather, the vintage.
And the thing that determines what happens to that fruit is the winemaker.
Neither of those requires the two to be in the same postcode.
The grapes are picked, chilled, and driven. Which is a lorry, and a lorry is not a difficult problem.
And it lets a small maker exist
Which is the actual point, and it is an economic one.
Because buying a vineyard is a barrier to entry of a very high order. Land, vines, decades of waiting, and a bank that does not want to know.
And renting an arch in Bermondsey, and buying fruit, is a barrier of an entirely different scale.
It is the same move as the gypsy brewer – who rents time on somebody else’s kit rather than buying a brewery – and it has produced a very large amount of the interesting beer of the last twenty years.
The thing that lets outsiders in is always a reduction in the cost of trying.
Which is the finding
Eight postcodes and a thousand and one hundred and eighty articles.
A new medium has no incumbents. There is no guild, no apprenticeship, and no correct way to do it.
Which is why three East End boys took over British fashion photography in the sixties, and why the door closed behind them within twenty years, once there were courses in it.
And the formula
Small room. Short list. Somebody who has tasted everything on it – and in this case, made it.
Which is as close as this survey has come to a perfect case.
Because the only line that has ever predicted a high score is whether the customer named a member of staff.
And it is very difficult not to, when the person pouring it is the person who made it.
Verdict
And the terroir argument
Which is the objection, and it deserves an honest answer.
Because the French position – and it is written into the appellation law – is that a wine is a product of a place, and that the place includes the cellar, and the air, and the resident yeasts, and the way it has been done for two hundred years.
And there is something in it. Ambient yeast populations are real, and a cellar does have a microbiology.
And the honest counter is that a great many celebrated wines are made with cultured yeast in a stainless steel tank, in a modern facility, by a consultant who flies in – and nobody complains about those.
The rule is enforced against the newcomer and waived for the incumbent. It always is.
Verdict
Superb, strong number, and genuinely doing something.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Someone sending this to their MP with basically no message attached.
Un amigo mío trabaja en periodismo. Dice que esto está mejor escrito que lo suyo, así que renunció. Lo siento, amigo.