Five great wines I’ve drank this month
And where you can enjoy them too.
If there’s one thing I excel at, it’s Having A Lovely Time. I am very fortunate in that, most of the time, my calendar is full of fun and delicious plans to look forward to, and I generally manage to eat or drink out at least once a week (because saving for a house deposit is for chumps).
August, however, has been exceptionally silly. A real glutton’s paradise. Coming off the back of both a holiday and a festival in July should have really lent itself to a quiet and frugal August. But I have exceptionally poor impulse control, and also – and I cannot emphasise this enough – it is summer, so I am contractually obliged to take the piss.
Over the last month, I’ve had the pleasure of dining at the Ling Ling’s pop-up at Dina in Leyton, heading out to Oxmoor farm for a gorgeous Sunday lunch (courtesy of my fellow bon vivant, Lauren, which you can read about on her Substack here), taking myself for a solo day trip to Margate, gorging on picky bits at Forza Wine, munching on pizza at Netil Market and then The Dusty Knuckle, and sipping my way through Nobody Asked Me’s BTG offering before hopping over to Lucky and Joy for dinner.
Over the course of this festival of excess, I obviously drank many many wines – the best of which I have kindly and selflessly compiled for your reading and drinking pleasure below. Along with recommending all these wines with my whole chest, I can also highly recommend all of the venues I drank them in, thanks to the lovely people who run them and make them such fun and friendly places to eat well, chat shit and get a bit pissed. So consider this a 2-for-1 list of not only what you should be drinking for the rest of the summer, but also where you should be drinking.
So without further ado, here’s everything I’ve drank recently that’s made me feel giddy with joy. Slàinte!
Solco Lambrusco 2022 – I cannot tell you how long this wine stayed on my mind after drinking it at Nobody Asked Me a few weeks ago. One of life’s all-time greatest pleasures has to be sitting in the height of London summer, feeling the sun baking against your shoulders as it coaxes your freckles out, while sipping on something cold and delicious. In this instance, the cold and delicious thing was a delightfully off-dry Lambrusco, bursting with ripe cherries and blackberries, and a fun, frothy fizz that felt reminiscent of being given a little plastic cups of fizzy Vimto at a mate’s seventh birthday party, before launching each other into the air on the trampoline, completely buzzed on E numbers.
Lissner Pinot Gris M 2022* – The Alsace, a region in the north east of France that borders Germany and Switzerland, is the first wine region that I fell head over heels for when I started learning about wine. Sure, I understood that French wines would taste different to, say, wine from New Zealand – but after trying wines from Domaine Durrman, Beck-Hartwegg, and Christophe Lindenlaub, I finally understood what it meant for a wine to take on the quality of the region it’s produced in, and how the terroir, climate and appellation controls of a specific region will influence what ends up in your glass. And whatever the hell they’re doing down in the Alsace? [Edward Cullen voice] “It’s like my own personal brand of heroin…”. Anyway, all of this is to say that when I’m looking through a bottle list or deciding what to drink, I’m always going to be drawn to any Alsace offering on the list – so when my friend Lauren and I were offered a skin-contact Pinot Gris from Domaine Lissner at Wingnut Wines, it was an immediate yes from me. Bright, crunchy red fruits and tangy stone fruit underpinned by a delicate smokiness – basically, everything I love about Alsace skin contact wines.
*At the time of writing I can’t find anywhere online selling this wine, but it’s imported by Vine Trail, and you might be able to get your hands on it at Wingnut like we did. Failing that, you’d be hard pressed to have a bad time while drinking any Lissner wine – my other pick would be the Altenberg de Wolxheim Grand Cru 2017.
Barraco Fior di Bianco 2022 – Strap in folks, it’s time for a whole lot of words about my recent day trip to Margate, otherwise known as one of the best days of my life in recent memory. On the sunniest day of the year so far, I set off for the popular seaside destination on one of my Mondays off work, conveniently forgetting that school holidays are a thing. Despite the ensuing jam packed train, the sweaty armpits that my face was crammed into, and the vomiting child standing next to me on the train, I remained buoyed by the thought of all the eating, drinking and swimming I was going to do.
After arriving into Margate, I made my way down to the harbour arm towards Sargasso to grab some lunch and a glass of something tasty. I opted for the squid sandwich, a bundle of crispy calamari piled onto a squishy brioche bun lathered with aioli and a squeeze of lemon, and a glass of the Fior di Bianco from Barraco, a Sicilian producer making quintessentially Sicilian wines with native varieties. The pairing of the crisp, round and refreshing Grillo and Zibibbo blend brought out the saltiness of the squid and the sweetness of the bun, and tied all the flavours together in a really harmonious way. A nice reminder that a really enjoyable experience is often more than just the sum of its parts, and that a good food and wine pairing can elevate a meal from something great to something really special.
Jean Maupertuis Pierres Noires 2022* – Yes, we’re still in Margate, and still at Sargasso. I’m generally not a big dessert guy, but that goes out the window the moment I see any combination of dark chocolate, sea salt and olive oil on the menu. Try and tell me that you can imagine anything better than sweating under the sun, before being presented with a quenelle of chilled dark chocolate ganache, luxuriating in a pool of olive oil with a dusting of flaky sea salt. Considering that the dessert leaned more bitter and savoury than it did sweet, it helped bring out the bright fruitiness of the glass of chilled Gamay d’Auvergne that I’d opted to drink alongside it, before giving way to a more dark fruited quality,the pairing almost reminiscent of a black forest gateau. Obviously, by this point I was practically ascending with joy – the combination of the food, the wine, the friendly and familiar service from the Sargasso team, the weather, along with the view of the beach and the big wheel on the horizon line, was enough to convince anyone of the existence of a higher power. I will think about this lunch for the rest of my life.
*I couldn’t find the 2022 vintage in stock anywhere online as turns out this is a pretty difficult bottle to get your hands on, but I have no doubt the 2023 bangs just as much.
Tiko Estate Orange Kisi 2021 – After a quick stop at the beach for some sunbathing and a little swim in the sea, followed up by a jaunt to the Shell Grotto (sorry, but have you seen it?? Literally the coolest place in the world), I made my way to one of my favourite spots in Margate, Pomus. The relatively new wine bar, restaurant and shop has exactly the kind of friendly and neighbourhood vibe that makes me want to return to Margate again and again, and that’s before considering that everything on the menu truly slaps – on my last visit, I had a panzanella-esque salad with a basil and creme fraiche sorbet which actually changed my life. This time, I opted for a few plates I’d enjoyed previously along with a couple of new ones, and let Ryan and the team guide me on what to drink.
Everything I drank was delicious, but the one that stayed with me was a Georgian orange wine, aged on skins for six months in Georgian qvevris. Georgian skin contact wine has gained the kind of reputation among specific demographics that, if listed on a wine bar menu, will have your Real Housewives of Clapton sorts ordering it without a second thought. The thing is, like any style of wine, there’s a lot of Georgian orange wine that just isn’t very interesting, or very good. I’m often wary of choosing it for this reason, concerned that it’s been added to a list because the venue knows it will fly regardless of whether they’d drink it themselves. I should have known better than to worry about this at Pomus though. The Orange Kisi had all the hallmarks of the kind of Georgian skin contact I want to drink – honey, ripe peach, trail mix and dried fruit on the nose – but also had a distinct wild sage quality, the kind that lined the coastal paths of one of the beaches we visited in Albania the month before. I’ve been finding orange wine a little underwhelming in general of late, but this is a wine I’d happily drink again and again (particularly if I’m drinking it at Pomus along with a plate of chicken karaage and pomme dauphine).
Other honourable mentions have to go to the bottle of Josmeyer Mise du Printemps 2022 I shared with my friend Steph at Forza Wine Peckham, the Bruno Ciofi Ze Chenin 2021 I had at Dina x Ling Ling’s with my friend Emma, and the Tour Blanc Sables Fauves 2013 from Provisions which was being poured at their event with The Dusty Knuckle, which I enjoyed with my friends Lauren and Ally.
Obviously, if you try anything off the back of these recommendations, I’d be extremely gassed to hear what you thought of it. Or, if you want to put me onto anything great that you’ve drunk recently or somewhere that you’ve visited, please share! I am literally always down to clown and love receiving recommendations almost as much as I enjoy giving them.
Thanks for reading!