Meg Maker defends the right to drink and enjoy cheap fizz, even as an esteemed wine writer, in her column this month.
I’ve just returned from London, where I used the excuse of the Circle’s annual Festive Party to justify a week of ogling art, meandering markets, visiting old haunts, and eating and drinking across a wet and windy city.
My spouse and I had the good fortune to have a friend’s flat in Kensington all to ourselves. Midway through the visit, on a Sunday evening, exhausted and hungry, we stumbled into a tiny Italian wine bar a block from the apartment. The windows were steamed up from its diminutive open kitchen, and the place smelled like pasta water and fresh bread, truffles and garlic. It was spare, with a handful of bottles arrayed along the kitchen wall and seating for merely a dozen.
A man about my age, swarthy, smiling, stepped forward and motioned us to a two-top. He was older than the man I’d seen in the bar’s Instagram account earlier that day. His father? At a nearby table a patron was chattering on a video call. After he’d hung up and dragged on his coat, leaving behind a half-empty bottle, our host thrust a plank of focaccia into his arms. “Take it,” he said. “It is fresh today, but tomorrow we are closed.”
The host turned to us. “Your first time here?” Italian tinted his smooth English. He pointed to the mirror behind our banquette which was scrawled with the evening’s by-the-glass list. Nebbiolo, Sangiovese, Trebbiano, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, Prosecco, Malvasia. A few more, mostly by grape, some by region. No producer, no vintage, just what and how much. Although the evening was new, many wines had been crossed out. Because “Tomorrow we are closed.”
Bottles were on offer, too, but we were there to taste, so we ordered two different glasses, plus a little snack. The host brought focaccia and a plate heaped with ribbons of prosciutto frilled with glistering fat. Soon another couple entered and took the table vacated by phone-man. They ordered glasses of Nebbiolo and Montepulciano, speaking in quiet tones in a mix of English and a language I could not recognize.
When there is food and wine and proximity, conversation happens, and before long we had endorsed the focaccia and inquired about their Nebbiolo, then ordered glasses of it for ourselves. We learned that this couple from Poland had lived all over the world, the man a journalist, writing in English.
The evening drew long, our glasses emptied, and the host asked if we’d like anything else. “Two glasses of Prosecco,” I said, watching his eyebrows rise and his face spread into another smile. The Polish couple smiled, too. They knew by then I was a wine writer, so might know what I was doing. Or maybe not?
Later, back at the flat, I quipped on social media that we’d finished with Prosecco, because I like to end a night with sparkling, don’t you? Some contacts offered thumbs up, a clinking-glass emoji. But a couple of others, including prominent wine commentators, said only: “Not Prosecco.”
What do we owe wine? I don’t mean any specific wine: this bottle, this vintage, this producer. I mean what do we, as wine writers, owe wine writ large? What do we owe each category within wine, the myriad classes and typologies that stock its vast kingdom?
Some writers might bridle at that question, resisting the notion that they owe anything to their subject. But criticism done well requires both objectivity and subjectivity. Wine commentators are obliged to know things and to think things, to render opinions. But also to do so in a way that opens dialogue, advances understanding. To do so with heart.
Sure, some wines are better than others. Some grapes and methods are more likely to produce interestingness. The world is indeed saturated with uninspired wines, made industrially not artisanally, made cheaply not attentively. We’ve all tasted them. In fact, we need to taste them to understand what makes other wines so great. We must be critical, in the analytical sense of that term, but we must also be generous. Because good criticism is not censure. Good criticism says how to think about this wine. Censure says don’t even think about this wine. The former is expansive, the latter is alienating, not only to readers and anyone who likes it, but also to producers striving to make each vintage better. To uplift.
It wasn’t the best Prosecco I’d ever tasted. It wasn’t the worst. But in that tiny neighbourhood wine bar on a dark and stormy Sunday, with dad pinch-hitting and ensuring nothing went to waste, as we lingered with new Polish friends we’ll never see again, those two glasses of Prosecco hit the spot.
Photo: Prosecco on the table in Conegliano. By Meg Maker