Corkage, 132a Walcot Street, Bath BA1 5BG (01225 422 577). Meal for two, including service and wine (lots of it): £60-£100
Halfway through our meal at Corkage in Bath, Marty Grant, the man who handles the wine side of the business, sat down next to us and presented a bottle. He’s a bright-eyed chap with a shaggy explosion of red hair and a neat line in patter. He had first tasted this red wine, a Château de la Tuilerie, when he was in his early 20s, he said. He was recuperating in Nîmes from a back injury incurred while trying to earn a living as a self-taught acrobat.
OK. Carry on.
“The moment I tasted it,” he said, “I announced that one day I would import this wine. And to this day I have imported over 130,000 bottles. It is Carla Bruni’s favourite wine, and was the only red served at Nicolas Sarkozy’s inauguration.” He slit the foil, poured a couple of glasses for my friends and wandered off. He could have banged on one about the syrah-grenache blend. Instead it was all acrobats and Sarkozy. My friends said it was jolly nice.
Frustrating, isn’t it? For once I’m focusing on the wine, and I’m light on detail. I would never just tell you a lamb dish was nice and leave it at that. I’d hunt down adjectives. I’d craft a simile and throw in a knob gag if it would advance the cause of turning a flavour into words. But with wine? It was nice.
What can I tell you? Despite the years in this job I’ve never quite managed to engage with the subject in the way that, as an adult, I suspect I should. My time is limited. The number of bottles is vast. My glass is empty. Let me drink and hush now with your homilies on varietal and sulphur. Over the years numerous places have come and gone claiming they were going to revolutionise the approach to wine; to make it accessible and democratic and fun. But it doesn’t seem to happen. They always end up telling you some story about the direction the wind was blowing on a wet Wednesday in the Rhône valley. Which, compared to tales of acrobatics and Carla Bruni, is no story at all.
In truth, I don’t think most genuine wineheads really want the subject to be accessible. It’s bloody complicated, they’ve invested significant time and effort in learning their stuff, and they like perving over the esoteric details. Why the hell should they open it up to a bunch of people who, when pushed, would admit they don’t really care?
My late mother was once asked what it was that made someone sexy. It wasn’t looks, she said. It was enthusiasm, and I’ll extend that to wine enthusiasts. To my mind the only thing that really makes any impact at all on the uninitiated like me is enthusiasm; a genuine desire to share, rather than show off. Happily it’s there right now in the jaunty features published by the wine fanzine Noble Rot. And it’s obvious in this Bath wine bar. It is rackety and chaotic. The food is deeply uneven. But on balance the place wins, through sheer force of personality.
The notion of a restaurant where all the bottles are available to buy to take home and also to drink in with just a modest mark-up is not new. The Vinoteca chain in London has done well off the back of it. The difference here is that the choice feels extremely personal and eccentric. Plus there are between 50 and 60 wines available by the glass. I ask whether they have one of those snazzy Enomatic wine-dispensing machines to keep opened bottles alive. No, Grant says, they have a fridge. Nothing hangs around long enough. I ask if there’s a list I can look at. No, he says. “There’s a chat. We discuss what sort of thing you might like.” The most expensive bottles bought in the restaurant top out at around £75, with much else half that or less and glass prices worked out according to simple formulas.
A classically light, bright Vinho Verde, made by a Welsh couple living in Portugal, is £20 a bottle. With its light fizz and low alcohol it’s the perfect kick-off. That Château de la Tuilerie is £4.50 a glass. Carla’s a cheap date. There’s a Catalan red at £6.50 and a Chilean pinot at £7. I ask if he has anything in the style of Chablis. He shrugs. “How about a Chablis?” It’s £7.50 a glass for something classically bright and crisp and just the right side of dry. This, I think, is how to experiment with wine. If I lived in Bath I would be here a lot, amid the babble and clatter, scanning the makeshift shelves – the bar seems to have been engineered using scaffolding polls – looking for gems that I could claim were my own private wine fetish.
Certainly this is a wine bar which happens to serve food, not a restaurant. All the dishes are there in service of it; not in some intense food-pairing manner, but to keep you from getting sloshed. The price of these small sharing plates, at no more than £7 or £8 a pop, is keen, but I do wish some of it had been a little more accomplished.
On the plus side there are substantial slices of toast piled with big blousy heaps of lightly dressed white crabmeat. There are whole cherry tomatoes, warmed through until just about to burst in an Asian-spiced broth, with more toast to eat them off. Chunks of pork belly have perfect crackling. A piece of sea bream is crisp-skinned, but sensitively cooked; ditto a piece of cod, the pearly flakes shrugging each other off, with shards of pancetta.
Other things work less well. Too much is served at room temperature: the beads of Israeli couscous under the pork belly for example, or the rice-like orzo pasta under the bream. Cavolo nero, the colour of an ancient book binding, is mixed with blue cheese and pears, and might have been pleasant warm. It’s less so chilly. And a dish described as a spiced purée of roasted butternut squash sounds fun until it arrives, and those of us who have weaned a baby immediately have flashbacks. I am baffled as to how the one dessert, a very dark brownie served with a darker chocolate sauce, didn’t bellow its need for cream at the kitchen.
Hey ho. These things can be fixed. In any case if you came to Corkage for the food, you would be missing the point entirely.
Jay’s news bites
■ Sager and Wilde in Hackney has a nice line in bar snacks, including scallop with XO sauce and asparagus with whitebait. But the food is a support act to the wine, the extensive list of carefully chosen bottles at reasonable mark-ups and by the glass. For a fee you can also bring your own bottles to drink (sagerandwilde.com).
■ And while we’re on the subject, Hedonism Wines in London’s Mayfair is a newish venture guaranteed to thrill anyone with even a mild booze habit. The work of a Russian businessman with deep pockets, it stocks 5,500 wines and 3,000 spirits, has bottles of 19th century Chateau D’Yquem costing six figures, but also has bottles starting in the low teens. Go just to gawp (hedonism.co.uk).
■ A five-year survey by AlixPartners and CGA Peach has found higher restaurant growth outside London than in. Food-led businesses in the capital rose 13.4% over the period, as against 22.4% outside. However there are still more restaurants in London than in all the other cities surveyed put together.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
