Of course, I’ve been to all three branches of Hawksmoor before, to one upwards of twenty times, however doing all three in one day is going to be a trouser bulging fest of quality meat, cocktails and giggles. I couldn’t wish for more wonderful people to share the experience with than Dan, Jeff and Dani. For those new to the site I’ll give a quick sketch of the Hawksmoor restaurants.

I first visited Hawksmoor Spitalfield when I was on day release from the nuthouse just over three years ago. When I look back at that review I find it rather inadequate and it does reflect that I was not quite at my best, but Hawksmoor were at their best and made one hell of an impression. So much of an impression that Hawksmoor has been written about in 5% of the 1200-plus posts on this site.

Back then the restaurant was somewhat more sleepy than it and its siblings are today. Sleepy, except for the City-type arses getting wrecked at the bar who were engaged in a minor punch-up. I cannot blame them too much, though, for I have now drank an awfully large number of Hawksmoor’s cocktails and they have all, including the Nuclear Banana Daiquiri, been so brilliant that you just want to drink as many of them as possible. The boys and I have drunk as many of them as possible.

Inventive, stylish, quality cocktails are one of the hallmarks of Hawksmoor and they are now, quite rightly, one of the very top cocktail destinations in London. Indeed, they make the only martini, their Fancy Gin Cocktail, that I would ever recommend anyone ever actually go out of their way to try^[1]. They employ some of the best bar staff in London who keep the list fresh with interesting drinks and never fail to mix everything to the very highest quality level. On one early visit I asked a bar lady for “Your most superficially innocuous but ultimately disabling drink, please!” She replied, “That’s the first order I’ve taken on my first night in this job and if that’s the kind of thing I’m going to be asked for I’m going to love it here.” Her drink was tasty and got me newscasted.

Cocktails are only a small part of the story – there’s meat too. On that first visit the large, flavoursome slabs of Chateaubriand Dani and I hoovered up made me think that Hawksmoor could well be the best steak restaurant in London. For my third trip there I was invited to a comparative meat-off, a tasting of different breeds and cuts of beef, and this showed that with the beef they normally serve they were most certainly London’s best steak restaurant. There was a time I was there nearly every week trying to decide precisely which steak I liked the best.

The menu has an array of comforting side dishes that just make you want to want to gorge yourself. Even things that sound awful like macaroni and cheese are brilliant. The triple-cooked chips are, these days, a delight. The whole dining experience is tuned to the basic instincts of having fun and being pleasured with hilariously good but not over-worked food. Dining at Hawksmoor is all about raw enjoyment.

Their two newer branches, in Covent Garden and, at the end of last year, Guildhall in the City, have only added polish to the Hawksmoor recipe and shown that Huw and Will, Hawksmoor’s boss men, have an unswerving dedication to pleasuring people as deeply as they can.

Indeed, Huw and Will are not the only members of the Hawksmoor team who are passionate about gratifying their patrons. Every member of staff I’ve encountered has been knowledgeable about and interested in what they are selling, and eager to satisfy all your meaty and drinky lusts whilst you are in their charge. The staff are a great bunch and if one of them has served you really well of an evening they don’t look too embarrassed if you give them a big hug before you leave.

That is why Hawksmoor is so good. Now I need to get a shower and a shave in time for:

Breakfast at Hawksmoor Guildhall

Hawksmoor Guildhall is the latest branch to open with a grand bar and dining room right in a smart part of the City of London. Since the venue itself is underground it can be easy to walk past the entrance, even though it is a rather lavish portal to this haven of pleasure. Walk in and you immediately feel you are in an oasis of civilisation where you will do well.

Walk downstairs and you know you’ll do well because the bar is massive and very tastefully decorated. There are plenty of tables for those whose legs are not up to three or more cocktails or if you don’t fancy the main dining room that is larger than at any other branch. I was pleased to see a decent number of City suits having working breakfasts in it (there’s free Wifi if that helps tempt you there) but I was a little disappointed so few of them were taking advantage of Hawksmoor’s all-day license by ordering cocktails.

I immediately ordered a Number 7 Bloody Mary, made with horseradish infused gin. Because I know and love Hawksmoor and any regular reader will pretty much assume I think they can do no wrong I’m going to be hyper-critical in this article. This BM was boozy enough but the tomato flavours just seemed a little dilute and it lacked a bit of richness. The salt and pepper rim of the glass was a wizard idea, though, and it was more-or-less fiery enough. I quickly followed it up with a Fancy Gin Cocktail. Hooray for FGC’s! Hooray for me!

The breakfast menu is rich and broad, with delights at all price points up to and including Hawksmoor’s justifiably famous steaks. If there are two of you, you can order a massive Hawksmoor Full English with a myriad of delights to share, or just horse down yourself if you are a particularly greedy bastard. I chose the Full English for one person and didn’t think it was overpriced at £15 considering the location and quality and quantity of food.

Dani chose a HKMuffin with sausage and egg, Jeff eggs Benedict and Dan smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. We were all distinctly satisfied with our breakfasts apart from one feature. For those of us used to King’s Sombourne eggs and Burford Browns their eggs taste quite ordinary, they do not live up to the quality of the other ingredients. This is a bit of a shame and also a surprise; Will and Huw are the perfectionists’ perfectionists and I would have thought they’d have sourced the very best eggs possible. There is a real quality difference between good and ordinary eggs and I think this needs addressing (unless we were unfortunate in terms of normal supplies running out or some such thing).

Let us not get too carried away with ova, though, the breakfasts were excellent and we really enjoyed the pastries that we also ate to make sure we’d survive until lunch.. I particularly liked the custard and marmalade doughnuts, which were wonderful constructions with brilliant vanilla-infused custard, topping marmalade of real character all inside a scrum-licious doughnut. The little custard tart was caramelised to utter bliss. Top stuff.

We did like the laboratory glassware they used for the coffee pots, even if the reason they give for using them on the menu is not remotely credible.

In summary, this was a great start to the day; breakfast was spot on (apart from the eggs) and with two cocktails I was fuelled like fire and melting with anticipation for further delights to come. We then headed of to the British Museum to revel in its glories until our next appointment.

Lunch at Hawksmoor Seven Dials

Hawksmoor Seven Dials just around the corner from Covent Garden has a similar design to Guildhall but is a bit more intimate and cosy – if it were not for my frequency-induced loyalty to the Spitalfields branch I’d say this has the best dining room and bar. So we installed ourselves in the bar.

Hawksmoor’s cocktail list is better than ever and they are mixed with incredible skill. Beezer barman Shaky Pete was battling with a laptop in one corner and after I caught his eye he prompted us toward some new drinks and they were all simply spiffing. I can enthusiastically recommend the Tokaji Smash, Dr Funk’s Swizzle, Blinker and Grapefruit Picador. All of these were at the screaming edge of cocktail brilliance and set us up for a hearty, healthful lunch.

The lunch menu covers the range of experiences one could desire for this all-to-often unexciting meal. In addition to the usual steaks, chicken, fish and worrisome meat-free contrivances there are also some more fun options, which we plumped for.

My chilli cheese dog starter was simply the best hot-dog I have ever eaten. It was topped with Ogleshield cheese, a deliciously powerful Cheddar-like fromage which gave a pungently attractive aroma to the whole thing. That smelled really delicious. The chilli meat was lovely and beefy, although maybe a bit hotter could have been nice. Then the dog itself was freaking triple-A, a wonderful meaty treat for all people who like noshing on sausage action. It was simply cracking.

Dani had some steak tartare, which can be one of the greatest joys of the table. However, this example failed on two of counts. Firstly, our waitress promised it was very spicy, it was nothing of the sort and in fact extremely mildly spiced. The degree of fire one seeks in steak tartare is a deeply personal thing so I feel it’s always best to provide meat with a selection of chopped goodies and condiments to mix to your own taste. I like them damned spicy and this failed.

The serious failure was the temperature it was served. Raw fillet steak doesn’t actually have that much flavour, especially when there is little spice to bring out the tastes it has. Serving this meat at the temperature of a cold fridge resulted in it tasting of almost nothing. This a real downer. Once we gave the meat plenty of time to get closer to a reasonable temperature it showed itself to be quality animal of fine character, and chopped to a perfect texture, but for far too long after it was served it was simply frigid in pleasure-giving potential.

The dining room was totally full all the time we were there so I cannot imagine this dish is ordered so rarely that a portion or two could not be kept ready to eat, rather than whipping some out of the fridge and leaving the diner feeling deflated. Again, I would expect more attention to this detail from Huw and Will who take food pleasure so very seriously.

Things were redeemed with our main courses. Jeff had another hot-dog which was totally delicious. He cleaned up all the bits of sauce and vegetable material from our plates to stuff the bun with and he ended up with a bulging package of serious sausage. He loved it.

Dani had a kimchee burger and, whilst he said the burger itself was brilliant and did go quite well with the least vile kimchee he’d ever eaten. I think that improving kimchee is a bit of a turd-polishing exercise. Far better was Dan’s Hawksmoor burger which, when I first tried it, I claimed was the best burger I’d had in my life up until that point.

But then, I had an even better burger. Made with pulsingly flavourful fillet steak and bone marrow, cooked to medium-rare perfection and topped with pickled jalapeños and Ogleshield cheese this had an unbeatable balance between meaty loveliness, chilli heat and cheesy richness. It was a fulgurating burger of total brilliance and I was moved by it.

All of these we had with either beef dripping chips or triple-cooked chips. Dan and Dani claimed the beef dripping chips were too chunky but I found mine highly pleasurable and I liked their pronounced crispiness which in many had reached that dissolute stage where most of the water had been driven from the chip and they were golden and vaguely translucent. I love that. I also loved Jeff’s triple cooked chips which were the best I had had from Hawksmoor.

We left feeling distinctly improved by our lunch, steak tartare aside, although before resuming our non-food culture activities I could have done with another one of the cracking cocktails. I would have to survive until half past six when we had:

Dinner at Hawksmoor Spitalfields

I’ve dined here more often than at any other restaurant and it feels like a home away from home. I’ll be there again on the 29 February for the opening night of the new bar that is being constructed under the dining room. If you see me there do say “Hello”. Offers of drinks are also greatly appreciated – ho ho ho…

This organ has served up an awfully large amount of information about dining here so I shall be brief.

The Sublime Society’s Arrack Punch, which I model here, is a totally winning cocktail and will put you in the mood for a large delivery of quality protein. A Concealed Weapon is another corking sharpener so I’m glad I had both. My friends’ cocktails were also brilliant and the bar staff here remain some of the most highly skilled in Town and are extremely personable.

The quality drinking continues with the wine list which has been upgraded to match those at other branches. With its brilliantly chosen, and mercifully not too long, selection of all sorts of stunners across the price range I maintain this is the best wine list I’ve seen in a restaurant. If you don’t fancy wine, and cocktails are just too much fun for you then the Meantime Pale ale is a top-quality beer. I had one after my string of sharpeners.

The steaks and side-dishes are as good as ever, which is to say pretty much at the zenith of their quality experiences, the 900g Porterhouse I shared with Dani was just the nuts. I was a little disappointed with the Plum Pudding pig belly ribs which didn’t seem as tender and flavourful as the Tamworth belly ribs they replaced. These were the greatest ribs I had ever eaten (time after time after time) so somewhat of a tough act to follow. The food was generally of top quality and extremely gratifying in nature, though.

It was a really enjoyable dinner and we felt it was a good finish to a deeply gratifying day’s dining. Which only leaves me to give a:

Summary of Hawksmoor and the Hawksmoorathon experience

Drinking and dining at Hawksmoor is a really pleasurable experience. The odd miss is excusable because everything else is so perfectly targeted at one’s pleasure centres. The food may not be the most complex in the world but it almost always slaps a large grin across one’s visage. Drinks are superb, from the peerless cocktails and wine list right down to the quality beer they have for the cost-sensitive diner. The staff are friendly, enthusiastic and handle restaurants heaving with merry diners with aplomb. They are amongst the best destinations in London if you are after a good time.

If you are really after a good time I can heartily recommend the Hawksmoorathon. It’s a rich and fun bundle of laughs that’ll keep you smiling all day. I would suggest you arrange engaging activities for the gaps between meals that allow plenty of time for sitting down to rest tired legs and assist digestion of meat. Don’t feel you need to hold back on anything, especially not cocktails; the healthy diner can easily manage three such engagements in a day. Although perhaps not every day – not for many days anyway.

I look forward to attending the Spitalfields bar opening on the 29th with luridly intense relish.

It is one of the most mirth-tastic days I’ve had eating and drinking and I would like to sincerely thank Dan and Jeff for treating us to this unforgettable experience.

Here’s their website where you can book a similar lark-fest for yourselves.

1. ^[1] Just to be clear, all other martinis are either rubbish or simply hurt too much. The FGC is mind-buggeringly strong but a delight to drink, and it doesn’t scald my stomach. Dukes used to make good martinis that didn’t hurt because of their anaesthetic value, but they lost the plot and now the place is a pale shadow of its ‘being rendered incapable of signing a credit card slip after a few’-glory days. ↩

When dining at The Grill at The Montcalm I had one of the best desserts of my life: rice pudding crème brulée. There is a picture of it here, doesn’t look anywhere near as wizard as it was. It was not simply sophisticated comfort food made incredibly well, it was brilliant nursery food targeted at one’s most joyously childish sensibilities. This gave me a brilliant idea for a beezer dessert.

Perhaps more than any other food, desserts appeal to our juvenile side. They are themed on sugar and quite often dairy products; no matter how complex the construction these flavours appeal to the toddler in us all. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It is certainly true that for the young of heart everything is fun and the simple pleasures of childhood days are accessible to all but the most drably rancid and crapulent – why not enjoy those pleasures in food?

Those of us who were blessed with guardians skilled in the culinary arts will have many memories of spiffing desserts as children. My mother was a great cook; I remember with pleasure the sheets of skin hanging down from the burned roof of my mouth caused by greedily attacking her brilliant jam and lemon curd tarts, and mince pies after too little time out of the oven when the fillings were still at global thermonuclear war temperature.

She made amazing apple crumbles with caramelised apple fillings that I’d even horse down in preference to my normal staple of unadulterated custard. These delights encouraged me to cook and I was soon making crumbles, baroque Sherry trifles and all manner of things by myself.

The thing Linda was really proud of was her sponge cakes. She always commented that when she gave them to people they said how light and fluffy they were, what a great texture they had, and how they were never dry or hard. I liked her making them for other reasons.

When she was mixing up butter, sugar, flour and occasionally lemon, lime or orange rind and juice for her fruit sponge cakes, I would hang around the kitchen with purposeful intent. Soon there would be a not-quite empty bowl used for the cake mix that I could greedily scrape clean using spatula, fingers and, if there was a really rich vein of cake mix and the bowl was big enough (or my head was still small enough) my tongue. Cake mix was an unparalleled joy.

Of course, what seemed like an interminable time after the cake mix was sucked off all implements there was cake. Hooray! My mother was right to be proud of her sponge cakes as she was extremely good at making them. A good sponge cake, possibly flavoured, with a nice filling and icing on top can be a real pleasure. If you are really childish then a big dollop of whipped cream will really enhance a sponge. They provided a totally winning experience.

So why not turn this into a topping dessert for bigger people who are in touch with their inner child?

For a start you are presented with a bowl generously larded with quality cake mix, which could easily be flavoured with some attractive combination of fruit, booze, chocolate or similar, and a tool or two with which to scrape the bowl clean of this wonderful concoction. You then get a little finger bowl to wash your mitts in case you got carried away polishing off the mix and used your hands. No shame in that!

Then, of course, you get served the finished cake! It would only have to be a little thing as presumably you’d have eaten plenty of mix, but when you eat the cake you can pretend you are all grown up and eat like a big boy/girl, even if you preferred the hedonistic delight of raw cake mix. Cracking, eh?

I admit this might not work at all but the most bleeding edge of three-stars, but at a certain kind of restaurant people would be lapping it off the bowls. Restaurants that serve food targeted at one’s primal urges and basic instincts of enjoyment would find cake mix and cake an incredible addition to their pleasure portfolio. Of the restaurants I regularly visit I think this would be a winning wheeze at Hawksmoor and probably also The Grill at The Montcalm; basically anywhere focused on raw pleasure. I can feel Heston Moomintroll preparing to swipe this cunning creation right this moment for the Corpulent Canard’s menu.

Even little deli’s and perhaps ‘oooh fancy!’-supermarkets like Waitrose would do well to sell you a little box containing a mix-smeared bowl, a little spatula and a cake for after afters. I will remind all these establishments of the first paragraph and await any contacts from executive chefs about royalty payments^[1].

More generally, unless you are aiming for high gastronomic art, this is what food should be about: enjoyment and pleasure. We are obliged to eat so it makes sense to revel and wallow in the experience and extract as much gratification from it as possible. This is what places like Hawksmoor, The Grill, The Bangkok Brasserie and Pizzeria Santa Maria do so well, serve excellent food that makes you happy. Why not make the child in you happy too? Have some corking cake mix!

1. ^[1] If anyone points me to an establishment purloining my ranking recipe I’ll pay a percentage of the damages as a finders fee. ↩

For those who don’t know, Dujac Fils & Pere is the part of Domaine Dujac that uses brought in grapes. Even though they don’t own the vineyards the Dujac team control every bit of the viticulture and harvesting so the wines are Dujac in all but name. They certainly don’t lack for quality and, for those of us who like to drink good things frequently, they don’t leave your bank account in need of a hyperbaric chamber.

Chambolle-Musigny 2007, Dujac Fils & Pere

A supremely pretty nose of lovely, elegant fruit and svelte earthiness. The fruit is ripe raspberries with a bit of blackberry in the family lineage; highly attractive. It is charged with life and vim, really speaking of Chambolle in terms of aroma profile. It smells just the tits, man, I bloody love it. The palate has plenty of bright, fresh fruit, good acidity and a really polished, silky tannic structure. Good mineral complexity and it has decent length. Incredibly elegant and remarkably enjoyable to drink. And that is what it is all about, eh? Being nice to drink. This is elegant and refined, with good complexity and length, but I just want to sit back and enjoy my glassful with a satisfied smile on my face. Lovely.

Non-newscasted readers may recall I had another 2007 Chambolle village recently, Christophe Roumier’s, and may want me to comment on which I preferred. That’s asking a lot, I must say! I’m going to start off being evasive and say there is actually little between them stylistically or qualitatively and move on to a firm opinion by saying, unless you have an annual allocation from Christophe at cellar-door prices (I just get two bottles of the Chambolle village a year, bums), I’d go for the Dujac Fils & Pere in a gnat’s heart beat – it’s far more value-mongous whilst being just as cat’s arse quality.

Editor Daniel and I popped this little charmer to have with our dinner, two rib-eye steaks from Woodlands Jersey Beef. They were quite stunning bits of meat, with a great depth of flavour and a remarkably tender texture. Quite spiffing. You can read my review of Woodlands Jersey Beef here, and their online shop is here.

If I may come around to the title of this piece, this morning I was feeling miserable as sin. I had a cold hanging around, I had really bothersome side effects from my medication and I’d had screamingly horrible dreams that I just couldn’t shake the feeling of after I woke up. I’m a sensitive type (there’s nothing wrong with being sensitive) and my day started out badly.

As the day progressed, I got a bit of writing for my book done, I arranged a meal with some new friends, I spoke to my great chum Jeremy on the phone for 40 minutes (sorry for keeping you away from the family, Jeremy) then I shared this marvellous little wine and a wonderful meal with Dani. I’m now incredibly happy and feel the day has been a great success. I cannot honestly say to myself I’ll sleep like the dead tonight and start off tomorrow feeling on top of the world, but for now, I’m a happy little bunny. Hooray! We should revel in the good moments when they come along.

The quality of meat available here in Hampshire is extremely high, but I was delighted to see Woodlands Jersey Beef at the Hampshire Farmers’ Market a couple of months ago as I know Jersey beef to be particularly tasty. The steaks, roasting joints and sausages we have got from them have all delivered really lubricious pleasure.

Woodlands claim bull Jersey calves from four dairy herds around the Hampshire region. They are normally culled at birth because they are considered too light and expensive for meat production. Jane and Paul Denley know what I have learned on my many trips to Jersey, that the high-grade beef they produce is well worth the expense of farming less productive steers.

The Jersey steers are fed on milk until age four-to-five months then on grass, hay and sugar beet in the winter until they are two-to-three years old. During this time they live outside in the glorious Hampshire climate and are not dosed up with hormones or regular antibiotic treatments. These are cattle that are allowed to grow at their own rate and express their natural flavours in an unforced manner. This is what we like.

The meat itself has a yellow colouring to the marbling and, after a prolonged Facebook discussion, I learnt this colouring comes from a high proportion of beta-carotene in the fat. This is a good thing: it’s healthy and adds to the flavour. You can see the yellow colour of the fat in this picture of a rolled rib I roasted just after Christmas.

What a rib of beef it was! A meat-tastic piece of protein that delivered all the flavour, fat and fun one wants from a really quality piece of animal. It was delicious and was one of the very best pieces of beef I’ve ever roasted. Feast your eyes on the whole thing:

It was cracking!

Last week I had a couple of rump steaks. Again, as you can see in this picture before they were cooked, the fat has a gentle yellow colour. Those used to pig fat might worry about this; yellow pig fat is either off or will go that way quickly. This is not at all the case with Jersey beef as I explained the source of the colouring above.

All it took was a generous seasoning with salt and pepper, ninety seconds per side in a frighteningly hot grill pan, then a ten minute rest and rump tastes of extreme pleasure were ours for dinner. Here they are cooking:

Because all of Woodlands Jersey Beef’s meat is dry-aged for 28 days before it’s sold the already superb character of Jersey meat is enhanced and gains additional complexity. They not only care for the cattle but care for the cuts as well.

The mince is really characterful and adds a distinct classiness to any dish you might cook with it. I made a rather spiffy chilli with my last batch, enhanced with dark chocolate, red wine and beef stock, and I felt I couldn’t have made a better one. It is not just mince and bears no relation to the kind of tasteless watery rubbish one picks up all too often in supermarkets.

We’ve also fried up some of their beef sausages which had the brilliantly rich character of the fancier cuts, but I really felt these needed the addition of lots of horseradish to make them shine. When I next see the Denleys at a Hampshire Farmers’ Market I might be bold enough to suggest they season their sausages a little more. That being said, if you like beef sausages these are simply the nuts.

Woodlands Jersey Beef have an online shop and will send beef to you by courier if you cannot get to them at a Hampshire Farmers’ Market. I recommend you make all efforts possible to secure some of this high-grade beef, your taste buds will sing your praises as you plough through the glorious flesh.

When I was cooking the steaks and roasting beef I had a look at my old favourite Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall’s Meat but I decided to check out the instructions in Hawksmoor at Home – the recipe book from my long-time favourite restaurant. I was glad I did!

The instructions for cooking steak are simple enough, pretty much as I give them above, but the roast beef recipe was mind-blowingly fantastic. From charring the outside of my roast to cooking it for hours at a low temperature the procedure provided quality aromas and yielded the perfect roast at the end of it. It was dead easy too.

This is a feature of all the recipes, they may seem like complex, ‘restaurant’ food but they are actually quite within the ability of any half-decent cook and made all the easier thanks to being explained with admirable clarity. As you would expect with Hawkmoor (here’s a review of their latest opening) they expect you to use the very finest ingredients, and so do I so buy them from places like Woodlands Jersey Beef!

There is more to Hawksmoor at Home than cooking meat. The macaroni and cheese recipe has been a real hit in Elitistreview Towers. There are even instructions on how to cook vegetables without getting cancer – I’m not sure about eating them, though.

A cocktail section includes all the Hawksmoor greats, including the Fancy Gin Cocktail – the single greatest martini I have ever had. I don’t need to read the wine section but I’m told by a lesser member of the booze illuminati it is quite useful.

As I went thought the brilliant book and drooled over almost every page (I think there were only two things I didn’t want to cook in it) it struck me that this is the only cookbook you will ever need. Some may take issue with that but there is one hell of a lot of good eating in that book.

Both Woodlands Jersey Beef and Hawksmoor at Home get the very highest recommendations from Elitistreview.

Eric Asimov of the New York Times and Keith Levenberg’s excellent Cellar Book blog have both recently published defences of the movement, or more specifically its definition and how that has been attacked, and I think they miss some important points about the emptiness of its message and mendacity of its followers.

My comments below are a greatly tarted up and considerably more opinionated version of a comment I left on Keith’s blog – you should visit if you like Elitistreview as he’s often right but, more importantly, a good read. No one is always right, not even your vastly brilliant reporter Davy ‘objective reality’ Strange, but there’s so much piss-poor toss on the internet it’s important to visit well-written sites like Keith’s (and mine!) to appreciate a bit of quality.

Both writers’ main thesis is that those who criticise the natural winemakers mainly do so because they dislike the nebulous definition of the ideology even when it is fairly clear what the followers support and that, if we actually try them, an awfully large amount of natural wines are properly good because the point of the movement is simply to try and make the best wines possible in the simplest possible manner.

Just to clear things up, I’ll give a definition of natural winemaking quoted by Keith from an ‘anti-natural’ piece by Mike Steinberger (you may also be interested in his follow up article here). It reads that natural wines:

are described as those that have been made with minimal involvement by the vintner. As with organic and biodynamic wines, the grapes must come from vineyards that have not been treated with synthentic chemicals; what sets natural wines apart is that the same hands-off approach is supposed to be carried into the cellar. The winemaker performs only those tasks that require midwifery, such as crushing the fruit. Apart from that, the wines are left to birth themselves. . . . This means relying on ambient yeasts—those floating around the cellar and vineyard—rather than commercial ones, eschewing high-tech toys like spinning cones and reverse osmosis machines, and neither acidifying wines nor otherwise tinkering with their composition.

I think that is what most winos would generally understand if someone said they were a natural winemaker; but it’s reasonably nebulous and allows a considerable degree of lassitude in interpretation. I have other problems with the whole idea.

It may sound simple and non-interventionist to grow your grapes in a method using as few chemicals as possible and have a light hand in the winery but on a purely semantic level there is nothing at all natural about wine making. With a stretch of imagination I could see a truly natural winemaker selling GPS co-ordinates to a wild-growing vine in some isolated spot that had dropped a couple of bunches of grapes onto the ground which, if you find and drink the putrefying juice over the next couple of days before it gets truly toxic, you could get a little alcoholic buzz from as the naturally present yeasts ferment the sugar in the rotting grapes and form some rancid approximation of wine. That’d be really natural wine and then there wouldn’t be a winemaker just a vine co-ordinate provider.

However, I recognise I’m taking the term literally and engaging in a bit of sophistry; heaven forbid we should use words in accordance with their definitions rather than how a self-selected group of opinion-formers decide we should use them!

Even so, it’s clear there is piss-all that is natural about selecting a bunch of specific varietal or clonal vines, planting them in an ordered manner in a novel location, controlling their growth with pruning, whatever compounds you permit yourself, harvesting those grapes at a specific point in their development before we even get to the whole convoluted winemaking process. Choosing the term ‘natural’ to describe winemaking, on a fundamental level, is simply mendacious because nothing about it is.

However, there are other reasons for disliking the term. Let’s look at the suggestion that natural winemakers are simply trying to make the best wines they can by not interfering in a process that can look after itself.

This is purest bullshit. Wine, like a lot of foods, is what is termed a partially spoiled product. This means it is well on the way to becoming toxically putrescent but something has stopped and stabilised it at a point along this path that enables it to be kept be palatable. Wine needs considerable help in not turning to vinegar and sulphur, one of my favourite compounds, is a primary weapon in doing so. Along with certain other anti-oxidant compounds this is precisely the stuff that natural winemakers and their acolytes deplore. The fools. This explains why so many natural wines are prematurely oxidised, bacteriologically unstable or suffer from any number of wine making faults.

My experience of wines that positively identify themselves as natural is that a very high percentage have an extremely limited shelf- or cellar-life before falling apart, and a lot of them are already knackered when you buy them. The largest number of natural wines I tasted at a single event was a bunch of South African Chenin Blancs and I cannot remember a more floridly flawed collection of wines since I attended a huge tasting of English wines in the late 90s. They were all just badly made.

Some natural wines I’ve had haven’t been faulty and a few have actually been very good, but the majority I’d send back if I were served them in a restaurant.

Which brings us to another piece of outlandish cheek from the movement: Point out their wines are rancid rubbish and you don’t get your money back or another bottle, you get lectured that you simply don’t understand the idiom and patronised with an explanation that your palate has been corrupted by modern industrial winemaking. This is what I got told when I commented out the Chenins were all faulty and – quite how I stopped the red mist from descending and there being much unpleasantness I don’t know. My beezer winemaking chum Jeremy, from Domaine Dujac in Morey-St-Denis, has been frequently told much the same when suggesting this in Parisian wine bars. Knowing his commitment to quality and hatred of sloppy thinking I’m impressed by his restraint in not only holding back from pulling rank but also not eviscerating the offenders; I’m perfectly willing to do so on your behalf if you forward addresses, Jeremy.

This is stunning arrogance on the part of the people peddling these goods. If your defence against customer criticism is that the customer is unworthy of your brilliance then you’ll only have the hard of thinking and easily led as customers. I recall thinking something similar when Jean-Michel Deiss told Pierre Rovani “You are simply incapable of understanding the greatness of my wines.” Sure, you can admire the ego-mania of those who say “You only say my faeces is crap because you are a turd, you are too inadequate to see the brilliance of my poo”, but you might not want to give them much of your money^[1].

Which brings us to more concrete reasons people might chose this moniker for their products. Calling something ‘natural’ is an obvious bit of spin designed to attract a certain segment of the market who buy products because the correct buzzwords are attached, who associate themselves with the agreed ‘right-thinking’ philosophies, not because the quality of the product.

Much the same goes for the loathsome word ‘sustainable’. There is a restaurant down the road that has an excellent menu that usually includes one or two oddities; namely, fish dishes that are termed ‘sustainable’ (complete with scare quotes) but no mention of the actual type of fish. They have other dishes that mention types of fish, but they are clearly targeted at people who want to eat a fish because they like the flavour of it rather than its perceived adherence to some unspecified moral values. I buy the named fish. I also buy good wine and the word ‘natural’ contains no information about quality at all.

There is a general point about sticking labels on one’s produce. It often strikes me that if something cannot be sold on its own merits it’ll claim as many popular associations as it can in order to gain a little more market leverage. When I speak to Lafon fans they rarely say, “Oh yes, I like him because he’s biodynamic”, indeed not many of my chums who drink his stuff have known this about him until I’ve blabbed. Mention Beaujolais to a certain type of wine fan and they’ll say “Oh yes, all those natural wines come from there.” My views of Beaujolais are perhaps uncharitable, but I think it would be fair to say they don’t attract very high prices for a long established, famous wine region. Indeed, they’ve not been shy of using Harrier Jump Jet-type marketing gimmicks in the past to try and help shift more bottles of the stuff.

I don’t think it is particularly surprising, or speaks positively of the movement, that most of its vocal followers come from regions where they need all the help they can get to sell wine. As I said, the biggest natural wine event I’ve been to was a South African Chenin tasting – that stuff doesn’t leap off the shelf. Beaujolais doesn’t either – perhaps Marcel Lapeirre does but he did before he learnt the word ‘natural’. The same goes for wines that loudly proclaim to be organic, biodynamic, free-range, macrobiotic, leftist-shite-flavour: the more help they need selling the more obvious their associations will be in order to get a bit of extra lustre for their products. Those of us who want to buy good wine don’t really care about the philosophical leanings of the vigneron and they’ve got no need to tell us, it’s enough that their product is high-quality. That’s what sells it.

I also have a bit of a problem that in loudly identifying themselves as THE natural winemakers, no matter how that is defined, these people are stealing and tarnishing the good names of a lot of skilled, pragmatic winemakers from the last few decades. Organic and biodynamic winemakers have a more strongly codified set of rules they must follow, indeed they must be certified to call themselves so, and my general experience is that people who follow these rules do make good wine. I don’t think these people are any more or less natural, it is just that they follow agreed-upon rules that are designed to look after the health of their wines and vineyards, rather than just adopting a moniker and then doing whatever fast and loose things they like with their wines. I know at Dujac they follow very strict rules in the vineyards and are extremely minimal-interventionist in the cellar, yet Dujac don’t claim any particular allegiances for the wines, beyond saying they try to make the best wine they can^[2]. Consequently, El Presidente Jeremy gets the door slammed in his face by a lot of dogma-obsessed buyers and pundits who just want to hear the right catch-phrases and not bother seeing if the wines are brilliant or fault-ridden.

I think this last point may be less known to those of us in the English speaking part of the wine world. I’m told by many French friends, and a couple of Germans too, that the wine-buying milieu for fashionable restaurants, wine bars and shops is extremely snobbish and opinionated about natural wines to the point that they are rude about quality wines simply because they don’t cow tow to these ideas. Many great wines are snubbed because they don’t have the right words attached to them and great winemakers patronised and condemned for similarly small-minded reasons. Such snobbish, self-righteous, ego-mania is right out of order; wine is a beverage that we enjoy for its pleasurable characteristics not for its adherence to modish philosophy. You don’t have to vote for it to run the country according to sufficiently right-thinking principles, you just have to drink and enjoy the good ones. Doing otherwise really is missing the point of the stuff.

That’s what it all comes down to: nice things are nicer than nasty things. As I said above, the term ‘natural’ contains no information about quality, so if you say you like natural wines you are admitting you’re more interested dogma rather than something being actually good. The fact that most natural wines require a lecture suggesting you’re inadequate rather than them being faulty shows the followers are more interested in smug self-promotion and desperately pushing sales rather satisfying a wine drinker’s desire for a good experience. I’ll always buy those good ones and I’d wager they’ll always have fewest trendy words stuck on them.

On a totally unrelated note, I feel I should say that sleep is a marvellous thing and not just for the weak. However, if insomnia is going to seize you it’s great to have something to do and I find a 2400 word rant on a current oenological topic a great way of filling the early hours of the morning. I’d prefer to have slept, though – I hope those who’ve battled through this piece do not also wish I had. I’ll have a little lie down now.

1. ^[1] The joke going around at the moment that all those makers sitting on countless bottles of oxidised white Burgundy are going to call themselves ‘natural ‘ and set up a massive Parisian wine bar selling the stuff at outrageous prices. If anyone complains that the wine is shagged the snooty staff will simply explain that this is ‘true’ and ‘natural’ white Burgundy. If the customer is unhappy with this expression of greatness that is their failing, they should get with the times and think themselves damned lucky that they can taste such authentic wines for mere stacks of cash. That’s pretty much the attitude of some people in natural wine bars. ↩
2. ^[2] If I may spill the beans on this one: I am aware that Dujac have been farming organically since 2001 and yet only decided to pursue certification in 2009. As such, their first certified organic harvest will be in 2012 and I bet none of their regular customers will give a tinker’s cuss or think anything important has changed if the word ‘organic’ does suddenly appear on the label. ↩