All posts filed under: natural wine

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Published by Juel

Arvid Rosengren, working in Copenhagen, recently wrote a thoughtful piece about natural wine. At the end of the post he gives fair advice to those who are for and against natural wine, including: “If things seem black/white it’s only because you don’t know better.” The neon sign at Little Social Restaurant is from Godard’s science fiction film “Alphaville” (1965). In the movie it is  what welcomes visitors to this outer-space city where all emotion is outlawed. Everything in Alphaville is a statement and nothing is an explanation. Even the word “why” is criminalized. It’s a dark and dystopic future. To have it enshrined on the wall in ironic neon, begs the question: are we there?  My friend and I were at Little Social Restaurant to have a lunch on a school day so nothing could stop us being the complete opposite: loud, impulsive, dangerous and devil-may-care. We were there to have a very long lunch. The sommelier gave a low whistle of approval when we chose the 2011 Arretxea Hegoxuri from Irouleguy. It’s from a tiny region in the South-West of France made up of a blend of white grapes with challenging Basque names translated …

2009 Occhipinti SP68 Bianco Sicilia

Published by Juel

Future shock. There was an idea floating about a few years ago that mobile phones would develop an intelligence to predict your next purchase while walking down the street. The utopian marketers did not see it as 1984-style surveillance, nor as an over-enthusiastic vision from an IT consultant, but as a new form of enlightened self-interest moving at warp speed. If you liked a certain brand, and wanted it at a certain price, your phone would alert you as you are walking past a shop. Just think how easily I could stump the system: all I would have to do is put in my recent ten wine purchases. My phone would melt walking past my local delicatessen – where I have found some amazing wines recently.

Flavour Chess – Jean Pierre Robinot, 2011 Concerto

Published by Juel

2011 Concerto Jean Pierre Robinot Masquerading as simply a light red from the Loire, on closer taste this is an entirely new wine, keeping the red wine tannins but swapping the fruit part with white characters: grapefruit pith, pomegranate seeds and campari orange. After an hour, the Pinot d’Aunis grape interrupts like a waiter with an oversized pepper grinder stopping the conversation. After this interruption it settles down again into a light-bodied red wine, and losing the funk, making the whole experience as unsettling to the senses as being lost in some South-East Asian market before the humidity rises and the fruits are unpacked in the cool early dawn. Robert Parker would call his Anti-Pleasure Police, which is not such a bad thing, but I had myself reaching for my bookshelf. Jean Pierre Robinot could be said to be one of the founders of natural wine (along with Marcel Lapierre) so if you like wines made for modern air-heads this is not for you. However, if you are in to weird Loire grapes and intelligent …

Natural Wine Bars & Bistros in Paris

Published by Juel

The Entrance for Artists. As readers of this blog may know, the last thing I enjoy with a glass of wine is a list of rules. I’d much rather join the circus. Arriving in Paris a couple of weekends ago to see a few natural wine bars, I stayed in the very un-chic 20th arrondissement. Groups of homeless men lay in sleeping bags huddled together beside concrete road blocks showing political signs from Mélenchon’s Communist Party. It was a very crisp, cold weekend. Pamphleteers handed out how to vote slips for Francoise Hollande.