,

Why I’m still yapping – homage to a great French wine pioneer

I’m on a Rhône roll. It all started a year ago when I was on a Vallée de la Gastronomie press trip exploring the food and drink specialities of the 500km corridor of France between Dijon and Marseille, much of it following that mightiest of rivers. 

De rigueur was a stop-off in the Northern Rhône wine region – home to fabled Syrah-based reds such as Côte-Rôtie, St Joseph, Cornas and, of course, Hermitage, its perfect terroir of vertiginous vineyards towering over Tain L’Hermitage on the left bank.

Our base was arch rival Tournon-sur-Rhône, across on the right bank and so officially in the Ardèche. Just 4km south we stopped for a bistro lunch – and epiphany. Nothing has changed in the hamlet of Mauves since the great American wine importer Kermit Lynch visited in the 1980s. In his Adventures On The Wine Route he described it as a “thin strip of a town that supports itself growing fruit and making wine. Nowhere in Mauves is there evidence of the French flair for storefronts, or any outward flair at all for that matter.”

Functional Mauves
Chave HQ

So there I am sitting in the Du Jardin à L’Assiette after my onglet de boeuf et sa réduction vin rouge/‘échalotes with a fruit-driven St Joseph from down the road when ‘Mauves’ strikes a chord. A quick Google of Gérard Chave and I briefly “faire mes excuses’. One minute down Main Street (really the only street) lies the HQ of one of the world’s great winemakers, recipient of the Légion d’honneur, whose family have been ‘treading the grapes’ since 1481. 

The pebble dash is much newer, but the faded sign looks almost medieval. Even before Lynch, the UK’s own Robin Yapp had made the pilgrimage in search of securing an allocation of the red (and the domaine’s equally sublime white).

In his Drilling for Wine, published in 1988, the same year as Adventures, the Wiltshire dentist turned wine merchant wrote: “The busy route nationale 86 passes through… in the dash and bustle of the traffic it’s easy to miss the small tin panneau set at right angles to the wall above the door, its faded legend J-L Chave, Vigneron being all that indicates the Chave establishment.”

The sign of greatness
Jean-Louis and Gérard

Jean-Louis was the name of Gérard’s father and also of his son, who runs the show these days with Dad benignly over-seeing. A classy rusticity belies a cellar containing sophisticated bottles that cost over £300 each, when available, from Yapp Brothers. The whole appellation only runs to 140 hectares, not much more than a major Bordeaux estate, of which Chave has the major holding (the negociant Jaboulet has the largest ‘Kindness-style’ banner on the hill).

Back in the early Eighties I was buying from Yapp great vintages of Chave Hermitage for a few quid, plus other near exclusives, equally tannic and long-lived… Auguste Clape’s Cornas and Robert Jasmin’s Côte-Rôtie. Each a different variation on the Syrah grape.

What a cellar. I can still recall the intermittent opening of a bottle, unleashing scents of raspberry, blackberry, black cherry, spice, olives and smoke. Time had to be taken with each glass as its wonders unfolded.

All long drunk, alas. The firm Robin formed is still going strong, though he is now retired and his son Jason has also stepped back, leaving stepson, Tom Ashworth at the helm in their new expanded premises near Frome, Somerset, having moved from Mere in Dorset. Have they left behind at “The Old Dairy’ the replica of the famous Châteauneuf-du-Pape statue Robin recreated at great expense? 

His prose is equally extravagant. Drilling for Wine (stocked by Abe Books) is a rollicking, picaresque tale of an ingenue with limited French at large in the Rhône and Loire. That he earned the trust and allocations of so many seasoned winemakers is testimony to more than his charm, but don’t let that spoil some good stories. Lynch’s book is in a different league – arguably the best wine travelogue ever written. His wine importing hub in Berkeley, California has arguably been as influential as fellow Francophile Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse restaurant there.

Grillet and Chave whites
Christian-Yves of St Gayan

And now a liquid Chave epiphany

I caught up recently with Yapp’s current range at their Annual Tasting on London’s Pall Mall. A limited range of the wines also featured at a Terrace Tasting at Ad Hoc in Manchester. This was organised by northern rep, Miles Burke, who is responsible for their increasing presence on the city’s restaurant lists, notably at Stow, MFDF Awards Newcomer of the Year 2026.

The true classics, though, turned up at Pall Mall. Among the reds, the aforementioned Cornas from Auguste Clape, darkly, brooding as ever, and Domaine de Trevallon from further south in Provence, still an outlaw outside AOC rules because it blends Cabernet Sauvignon with Syrah. I must have collected the first 10 vintages of the latter, but it’s now outside my price range. The 2016 now costs £125 retail from Yapp, the 2012 £215 on the Stow list. The 2017 Clape is £150 from Yapp and £290 from Stow (a kind mark-up).

Good to reacquaint myself with such old faves, but it was a duo of legendary Rhône whites that captured the attention of myself and many another taster on the day. 

Château-Grillet 2022 was the headline act. All the characteristics of the Viognier grape were there – honeysuckle aromas and textures of stone fruit on the palate  – but it felt a touch closed in, a reminder that 10 years of bottle age would transform it. This monopole vineyard with its own AOC and a handful of growers under the Condrieu AOC flew the unfashionable Viognier flag for decades. Hard to believe when this grape is now cultivated across the globe. Alas, too often creating blowsy wines, all vanilla and talcum. Nowhere but this narrow corner of the Rhône is is it so sublime.

Alongside it on the table the powerful White Hermitage that is not overshadowed by its red sibling. Domaine Jean-Louis Chave 2020 blends Marsanne and Rousanne for a rare complexity and a 14.5 per cent ABV. A food wine, as they say.

For an entry level Rhône white (just £17.50) across the room I encountered a Côtes du Rhône Villages L’Oratory Blanc Sablet 2024. This an aromatic apricot and peach-laden blend of Southern Rhone varietals Viognier, Bourboulenc, Clairette, Roussanne and Grenache Blanc from Domaine Saint-Gayan. When we visited in the Eighties with the kids in tow (“go play with the vigneron’s dog while we taste”), the target was the surprisingly elegant, powerful old vine Gigondas red produced by Roger Meffre. The winemaker now is his son-in-law, Christian-Yves Carré de Lusançay, who was pouring at Pall Mall. 

In the diary – the ‘Rhone In White’ show at Freight Island

If all this has whetted your appetite for the whites of the region, try and squeeze a ticket for a Trade Show at Manchester’s Freight Island on Wednesday, April 29.

Explore 100 plus Rhône whites from 20 plus appellations, North and South. 12pm-5pm. The doyen of contemporary Rhône experts, Matt Walls, will hold  two masterclasses exploring the Rhône’s diverse styles and terroirs:

Matt moved his family to the region for two years to research his comprehensive Wines of the Rhône (Infinite Ideas, £30). Indispensable.

Five Yapp wines that won’t break the bank

IGP Collines Rhodaniennes: Patrick Jasmin ‘La Chevalière’ 2023 £19.95

Patrick took over the family estate in Ampuis when his father Robert was hit by a car and killed in 1999 and has continued to make exemplary Côte-Rôtie plus this ‘mini version’ from lesser Indication Géographique Protégée vineyards. Sleek and lovely Syrah. 

Jura Arbois: Trousseau Domaine Jean-Louis Tissot 2024 (£21.50)

A light, spicy red wine from pure Trousseau – a grape which thrives on the slopes around Arbois in the Jura region between Burgundy and the Alps. The Tissot Ploussard is even lighter but equally savoury.

Tavel: Domaine Maby ‘La Forcadière’ Rosé 2025 (£17.95)  

Forget all those pale commercial Provencal rosés. This organic, full-bodied deep pink Rhône iteration is a great food wine. It would cope with a herby meat daube or even a tagine.

Saumur Champigny: Domaine Filliatreau ‘Vieilles Vignes’ 2022 (£23.25)

A red I have loved for 30 years. Everything a Loire Cabernet Franc should be and more. Perfect slightly chilled now but lay it down for a few years and expect even greater rewards.

Reuilly: Gerard Cordier Blanc 2024 (£17.75) 

Robin Yapp’s pioneering expeditions extended beyond the Rhône into the Loire and even today when the list covers many regions some stalwarts from the Valley remain. One of the most evocative chapters from Drilling for Wine is his meeting with the generous Cordier family, restoring his faith after he had been ripped off by a grower in another small village. The Cordiers still supply their Reuilly sauvignon blanc and, as I write I’m going to match it tonight with new season asparagus. Let’s close with the Yapp catalogue’s celebration of this humble white: “It has a bracing bouquet of wild flowers and camomile with crisp, nettle and gooseberry flavours on the palate.”

So a far remove from Chave White Hermitage, but wine offers so many varied delights. As exemplified by a Yapp Brothers Tasting. By they way, there never was a Brother. Robin thought the name added gravitas to his nascent operation.

/by
, ,

My Italian food trail – the ancient Umbrian ‘pea’ Roveja

Pottage is a lovely word, summoning up a comfort dish to ward off the bleak  February chill. Maybe one caveat re this perennial thick stew comes from the Danish proverb: “One ill weed mars a whole pot of pottage.” Reassuringly, winter is not conducive to foraging, so usual suspects spinach, carrots and courgettes have been chosen to flesh out this Pottage of Roveja. Plus a Swiss-Italian buckwheat ribbon pasta called Pizzoccheri, which I first encountered last year on a visit to the Poschiavo Valley.

As I open my 250g pack of Roveja, an ancient pea variety, cultivated almost exclusively and on a tiny scale in the Umbrian mountains, south of Perugia, I am struck by its lentilness in the round. Dark green to brown, it fits that legume bill, but will need a lot longer soaking – 24 hours and more. Is it the ancestor of the modern pea or a separate species? The jury’s out. I just know that simmering if for a few hours produces a beguiling, earthy stock for the soup/stew.

It’s a debut in my kitchen for one of nature’s great survivors, brought back from near extinction after being spotted growing feral in a ditch. Imported from the Middle East in Neolithic times, Rovejab goes goes under varied names across Italy – notavly pisello selvatico or pisello dei campi o robiglio, roveggia, roveglia or corbello.  Its niche resurgence is down to being adopted in 2006 by the Slow Food Presidium, champions of small traditional producers.

They don’t come much more traditional than the good folk around Civita di Cascia  and Valnerina in the Sibillini Mountains.  All cultivating, weeding and harvesting is done by hand. Nutritional scientists laud it as a legume rich in fibre, proteins, phosphorus, potassium and vitamin B1, yet free from fats and gluten. 

Once it was a staple in the diet of herders and farmers. The beans are grown at altitudes between 600 and 1,200m, planted in March and harvested in the middle of the summer, to be dried out for all-year consumption. Harvesting is a laborious challenge. Combine harvesters can’t be used because the long stalks lie flat on the earth, so the plants must still be scythed manually. 

Besides soups, Roveja can make a fine side, flavoured with crisped guanciale and grated pecorino. Very Italian, then grains can also be ground into flour to make a polenta typically seasoned with anchovies, garlic and olive oil. 

I was happy with the pottage l made from the dried dried peas sourced from my favourite Italian supplier, the Ham and Cheese Company of Bermondsey.

/by
,

It’s a Zin! But what version of this enigmatic Californian red will turn up?

1976. Up in Dry Creek Valley, Zinfandel heartland of Sonoma County, Joel Peterson was picking for his first solo foray into crafting that stalwart Californian red. A lightning storm drenched the 29-year-old amateur winemaker as he hoisted 50lb tubs of grapes into his truck while two ravens harassed him from a nearby tree. And thereby hangs an epiphany. 

Let Zinfandel chronicler David Darlington take up the story in his Angels’ Visits (1991): “At the time Joel was reading Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermuir, a gothic novel whose hero, Lord Ravenswood, falls off a bridge and drowns in quicksand while coming to the rescue of his sweetheart.

“Under the circumstances it seemed to Joel that such a plot might also describe the start of a small winery. As he drove away… the setting sun squeezed beneath the clouds, igniting the landscape a surreal orange and painting two rainbows on the charcoal sky. In Joel’s mind Sir Walter Scott receded and Native Americans appeared as he recalled an Indian legend wherein man is discovered in a pod, and is instructed in the arts of survival by a raven.”

Colonel Haraszthy – crocodile bait?
Zinfandel is so thin-skinned

Ravenswood – Gothic birth of an iconic producer

Joel Peterson is a great survivor himself. The gestation of his Ravenswood brand might sound fuelled by waccy backy – this was seventies California after all – but Joel’s ‘drug of choice’ was always a certain heady, tannic red made from the State’s bedrock grape. Zinfandel is a thin-skinned, small grape which means less skin-to-juice ratio, so potentially higher tannins. It is also  notorious for uneven ripening, so bunches have to be left on the vine to ripen fully. This leads to high sugar in the berries, which makes for high-alcohol wines. Hence a now discredited trend for late harvest Zins, dry and sweet.

Peterson never went down that route. 600 cases were made from that initial harvest. After which he became a gypsy winemaker around the area until he eventually could create a winery of his own. His pride and joy were the single vineyard Zins he made, lauded by the likes of Robert Parker. The plan was for small open top, redwood fermenters, hand punch downs, extended macerations, native yeast, gentle transfer, minimal processing and small French oak aging – all done by hand. European with a Californian twist.

But he admits in the book that their ‘Chateau Cash Flow’ was the generic Ravenswood Vintners Blend, the cheaper early release version. Launched in 1983, annual production neared one million cases, at one point, making it the world’s  bestselling red Zinfandel. You’d find it in Morrisons and Tesco, maybe still can.  Dwarfed, though, by the big guns who dug a gold mine in creating White Zinfandel Blush. But that’s a whole other story.

Ravenswood itself was engulfed by drinks behemoths. first Constellation Brands and then on to Gallo (California-based, it’s the largest wine producer by volume on the planet). Ravenswood then went into limbo and Peterson founded a new boutique winery, Once & Future, to recapture the magic of Zinfandel, and his son, Morgan Twain-Peterson, became a Master of Wine with his own highly regarded winery, Bedrock Wine Co.

Food-friendly Once & Future
Ridge Zins come under many labels

Serendipity that led me back to top-end Zinfandel

So is it a case of the Zinfandel Empire fights back? Ironically Gallo have resurrected Ravenswood as a fine Zinfandel with an initial annual production of 6,000 cases with Peterson as consultant. For his own project he remains an inveterate searcher out of off-the-radar old vine parcels. Hence the Wine Society bottle I’m about to sample. This latest example of their flagship ‘Exhibition’ range is the result of an abundant 2024 vintage leaving Peterson with more Zinfandel than usual. 

This bespoke blend lives up to its Society tasting notes: “With an average vine age of over 80 years, this full-flavoured, vibrant Zinfandel has a rich cherry, plum and blackberry perfume, bright acidity with rich soft tannins, and an evolving long finish. Made in small open top fermenters, and aged in about 10 per cent new oak the resulting wine has great balance and generosity.”

So quite a step up from the Vintners Blend. Beautifully balanced, it still weighs in at nearly 15 per cent ABV, but it wears the alcohol lightly. It proved a perfect accompaniment to a hot game pie. Serendipity? The special offer (£16) came into my e-mail box just the day after Angels’ Visits dropped through the letter box. I’d bought the book on a whim after it was extolled in the Substack of one of my favourite wine writers. Anyone who shares a podcast (Intoxicating History) with Tom Parker Bowles must be posh but Henry Jeffreys is a sharp and streetwise advocate of all things grape.

Joel Peterson in the vat
Paul Draper in the vineyard

Grape rivals – Ridge Vineyards versus Ravenswood

I was captivated by Angels’ Visits because it tells stories of individual, very individual, Californian winemakers who have championed the Big Zin since the Sixties… and their vastly contrasting wine styles.. Essentially, though, it centres on Peterson’s Ravenswood and arch rivals, in the Santa Cruz Mountains (main picture) south of San Francisco, Ridge Vineyards. Their Zinfandels under well-travelled philosopher winemaker Paul Ridge aimed for a Bordeaux-style elegance over power. Matching its signature wine, the Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon. Draper, who turns 90 in March, has long been Emeritus.but his cerebral approach remains under the hands-off ownership of a Japanese pharmaceutical giant.

Last year I tasted half a dozen Ridge wines at a Berkmann Cellars trade event in Manchester – Zinfandels from their Lytton Springs and Geyserville particularly captivating, if just a mite polite. Angels’ Visits author Darlington does stray into  Jungian parlance of Apollo versus Dionysus. I see where he is coming from. His historical research into how Zinfandel wound up in the Golden State is more plodding. The jury really is out on whether it is the same grape as  – or a close relative of – the similarly thick-skinned Primitivo of Puglia in Italy.

He does debunk the once accepted theory that it came from Hungary or Croatia  via the colourful founder of Buena Vista winery, California’s first, dating back to 1857. Colonel Agoston Haraszthy’s portrait still hangs in their Sonoma base. The grape was also, quite boringly, believed to have originally been a table grape in New England.

When Haraszthy went bust he hopped off to Nicaragua to make spirits from sugar and met a bizarre end. Over to Angels’ Visits again: “On July 6. 1869 he went to meet a business associate on the banks of a Nicaraguan river. He never returned. His footprints were found leading to a tree whose limbs reached across the river: 

one of th/e branches, broken off in the middle, was presumed to have snapped as Haraszthy tried to cross on it.

“A few days earlier at the same spot a crocodile  had killed a cow, and to this day Agoston Haraszthy is assumed to have followed the unlucky bovine into the jaws of oblivion.”

/by
, ,

My Italian Food Trail: Peposo (don’t stint on the peppercorns)

Scuse, my Peposo is inautentico. It’s the chopped San Marzanos that are the culprits in this. Tomatoes hadn’t made their arrival from the New World when this famous Florentine beef stew first sprang to prominence  in the 15th century, promoted by Renaissance man incarnate Filippo Brunelleschi. This and the tiled dome of the city’s Cathedral are his lasting legacies.

In a week’s cooking schedule that began with the daring spice fusion of two Gurdeep Loyal dishes this Peposo was earmarked as a bowlful of Italian authenticity. And, yes, as I was preparing it UNESCO designated the whole of Italian cuisine as an intangible cultural heritage. 

Such recognition is never likely to address the tangle of Asian Second Generation food strands found across Leicester-born Gurdeep’s two cookbooks. I reviewed the latest, last summer, but it was from his debut, Mother Tongue, that I yoked together Curry Leaf, Lemongrass and Aleppo Pepper Chicken and Sambhar Sweet Potato Hasselbacks with Red Leicester. Neither was what you would call a shy, retiring dish.

Still there seemed to be some distant affinity with the work-in-progress Peposo. The Tuscans are reticent about spicing, just as they eschew salt in their bread, and beloved pasta dish Cacio e Pepe is rather subtle with the the Pepe. Not so Peperoso. Some recipes recommend insane amounts of black peppercorns giving  a real kick to a dish of markedly few ingredients – olive oil, red wine, garlic, salt and stewing beef. Note, no onions or herbs.

Nothing but shin beef will do – discuss

A purchase of two kilos of Belted Galloway shin beef on the bone from Littlewoods of Heaton Chapel was a kind of cart before the horse inspiration. The roasted bones had contributed molten bone marrow – a freezer staple for lubricating home-made burgers in the future – and helped make  a goodly quantity of beef stock, too. The chopped up beef was perfect for the long stewing required for the Peposo. 

It’s a stove-top, pan-off operation where the Chianti (a whole bottle for 800g of meat) evaporates and enriches it. Even richer with the two cans of quality tomatoes, which I stand by.

Two stalwart UK champions of Italian food, Jacob Kenedy (Bocca di Lupo) and the late, great Russell Norman (1965-2023) go big on tomatoes in their versions. I went with Russell’s because his Brutto: A (Simple) Florentine Cookbook (Ebury Press, £32) proved an invaluable companion during last year’s travel-writing expedition to to the city. In particular it introduced me to the challenging street food tripe, Lampredotto for Confidentials. And yes I am now a fan of that braised tripe from the cow’s fourth stomach, doused in salsa verde, on a bun.

You won’t find it on the menu of Norman’s Trattoria Brutto in London’s Smithfield, but Peposo’s usually an option. In the preamble to his recipe (included later) he describes it as “a dish of extremely deep flavours and comforting textures. But it’s not a preparation that can be rushed. You need at least four hours, preferably more, and – as with many Tuscan recipes – it is improved by leaving it overnight. I’d love to be able to say you can use an alternative cut if you can’t get hold of beef shin, but it really must be shin. And you must leave the fat on – do not be tempted to trim. Your butcher will always be able to provide shin, even if your supermarket can’t.

“Additionally, the wine element needs to be appropriately regional. Chianti or even a standard Sangiovese, will provide much better results than a cheap New World Merlot from a petrol station.’

I used Lidl’s standard Chianti Riserva, Corte Alle Mura. Fort £1.50 more they have a  Christmas special on, from the same 2019 vintage, Medici Riccardi for a couple of quid more.

Russell’s version is actually rather modest with its pepper input. As it melted together over the long stew I ground extra peppercorns (Kampot, of course) into it. The result was a tasty marvel, which I first served with Judion beans in a tomato and sage sauce, the next day with a creamy celeriac and apple mash. Accompanying it then, a Fontodi Chianti Riserva (a ste up from Lidl). Each time we scooped up the rich juices with slices of Todmorden-baked baguette Tuscan-style. In Florence they have a saying for it: ‘fare la scarpetta’, which translates as “to do the little shoe”

The spectacular Duomo
Vintage time in Prunetta

Brunelleschi and a Duomo built on peppery beef stew

The acknowledged birthplace of Peposo is in Impruneta on the Arno, 15 miles south of the centre of Florence, where the Chianti vineyards really start. At the end of September ‘Peposo Day’ is an important part of the town’s flamboyant Grape Festival with local cooks battling it out to produce the best version.

Why Impruneta? It’s all down to the terracotta industry that has been there since the  Middle Ages. Its furnaces baked the burnt-red roof tiles used in the construction of Florence’s Doumo. The workers exploited the front of the kilns to slow cook in orci (olive oil/grain jars)  poorer cuts of meat with pepper and wine for their daily repast. 

On his Impruneta visits the Duomo’s architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, became a  fan of this Peposo with its peppery kick and twigged how this slow food could become fast food for his work team high up in the scaffolding. 

It would save valuable minutes if they ate on the job rather than clambering down and back up each lunchtime, so he ordered the Peoposo to be transported by wagon to Florence in terracotta casseroles, then hauled up to scaffold canteens. Not sure if the abundant red wine also winched up was a good heath and safety idea…

A hands-on Russell Norman
Brunelleschi by his contemporary Masaccio

Peposo the Brutto way

Ingredients

100g lard (or butter if you’re afraid of lard)

800g beef shin, cut into small chunks

Flaky sea salt

1 bottle of Chianti or Sangiovese

2 cloves of garlic, finely sliced

2 tbsp black peppercorns

2 x 400g tins of chopped tomatoes

Black pepper

Sourdough bread, for serving

Method

Melt half the lard in a very large frying pan and sear the meat on all sides until nicely browned. Add a few pinches of salt during this process. You may need to fry in batches to avoid overcrowding the pan. If there is a dark residue at the bottom of the frying pan, deglaze with a splash of red wine. When all the shin is brown, transfer to a very large saucepan in which you have melted the remaining lard. Add the sliced garlic and the peppercorns, and stir for one minute. Now add the chopped tomatoes and the rest of the wine. Bring to the boil briefly, then reduce to a very low simmer.

For the next four hours, keep half an eye on your Peposo to make sure it’s not drying out too quickly. If it is, cover it, but the full bottle of wine should have been sufficient to keep it stew-like. After four hours, check the seasoning and adjust if necessary. The beef shin will have disintegrated somewhat and become stringy and soft. You can encourage this further with some hearty wooden-spoon action. If it hasn’t, leave it longer. Or you could let it cool and leave it covered overnight. Then give it another 30 minutes on a medium heat the next day.

Serve with hunks of sourdough or unsalted Tuscan bread.

/by
, ,

Secret SAMPA offers cutting edge Brazilian fusion and grape revelations

The underground world of SAMPA Chef’s Table  is full of exotic flourishes. A Brazilian wonderland of toucan water jugs and vivid pink flamingo receptacles for your pre-dessert cashew apple ice lolly. That’s before chef patron Caroline Martins’s signature abstract expressionist finale – scrawls of coconut yoghurt, basil custard and mango across a slate, to be topped with meringue. That this performance takes place in a penumbral secret location in Manchester’s Northern Quarter adds to the sense of delightful disorientation.

 

A further mind scrambler. Where else in the UK would your pairing consist entirely of Brazilian wines? Former Great British Menu contender Caroline proudly flies the green, yellow and blue flag of her native land in the quality of ingredients she imports, so why not do the same with the wine list? 

Compared with South American cousins Argentina and Chile, Brazil as South America’s third largest wine producer is almost as much a mystery as the new SAMPA venue. Hard to remember a bottle on our supermarket shelves – despite Brazil boasting more vineyard area than New Zealand.

A vinous voyage into the dark

Book a SAMPA dinner and you’ll get the location sent to you just pre-arrival. Presumably the same applied to the intrepid wine lovers who had signed up for a  tutored tasting in the afternoon ahead of our evening meal. It was hosted by Go Brazil Wines’ Nicholas Corfe, who later poured his wares for us. He has championed the cause – along with national spirit cachaça – from his Suffolk base for 15 years. He cherry picks from small producers in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Vines were first planted in Brazil by the Portuguese in the 16th century. Then, in the 19th, came Italian immigrants, mainly from the Trento and Veneto regions of the north-east. In the Seventies an international player, Moët & Chandon, arrived to introduce modern vinification techniques.

There was nothing rustic about the four wine matches at SAMPA. What did I make of them?

The dinner was bookended by two sparklers, Amadeu Laranja Nature Traditional Method 2020 and a Don Guerino Moscatel NV 2022, the former on the orange spectrum, the result of extended maceration, refreshing and surprising complex, the latter a sweetie with counterbalancing acidity, weighing in at just 7.5. per cent ABV.

I enjoyed both, but had less joy from Pizzato Sauvignon Blanc 2024. Grassy on the nose, it promised more than it delivered, its tropical fruit muted, the mouthfeel quite coarse.

The Pizzato vineyards
Nervi is their red flagship

In contrast a red from the same Serra Gaúcha-based winery, the Pizzato Nervi Reserva Tannat 2020 was a terrific example of a heady grape variety associated with Madiran in South West France. Uruguay has proved a natural home for it in South America, but, based on this example, Brazil is giving it a run for its money.

From the great 2020 vintage, it has been aged for 11 months in new French oak barrels. Result: concentrated dark fruit and spice, soft tannins, a hint of leather perhaps. It would have coped well with a meatier main than Caroline’s (delightful) galinhada chicken. 

Pizzato own 45 hectares of vines split between their original Vale dos Vinhedos (Valley of the Vineyards) estate and the newer Dois Lajeados. The vines for Nervi are 25 years old, from the first plantings after the family switched from supplying grapes to big wineries to becoming an independent producer. Such a wine vindicates that bold decision.

Has maverick Martins found her perfect base?

Caroline Martins has made quite an impression since landing in Manchester some five years ago with husband Tim (who marshalled the troops brilliantly at the latest launch). She famously swapped a globetrotting career as a plasma physicist to go on Masterchef Brazil and train at Le Cordon Bleu in London. Check out the highs and lows of her career path in my recent interview with her, ‘Why female head chefs are flourishing around Manchester’.

A trajectory that has encompassed numerous Brazilian-British fusion pop-ups led her to the unlikely Northern Quarter combo of Calcio Sports Bar on Dale Street with Chef’s Table experience for just eight folk in the cellar. It was a fine dining homage to the food of São Paulo (Sampa is its colloquial name). Now she has found a new home for her project, spacious enough to almost double her covers and include its own art gallery. The current exhibition, ‘Saudade’ is by one Pete Obsolete (below).

Caroline continues to refine her playful food offering. I particularly loved the laranja lima (a chalkstream trout carpaccio) and the ‘Garstang white cheese with fig leaf and Dan and The Bees honey, both evidence of our immaculate British sourcing.

PS Beware the potent Brazilian chilli that lurks among the snack starters of pineapple and pickles. Diito the fiery yellow dip with the pichanha tartare. Oh and prepare for a slight fuggy atmosphere in the underground lair. Caroline does love blow torches and smoking dishes!

A 12 course tasting menu comes in at a remarkably good value £58 (£69.60 inc VAT). The drinks pairing is £48. For £30 you can bravely match the dishes with a range of Cachaças. Book here.


/by
, ,

Viva Louis Vegas! American-Italian comfort food it’d be a crime to miss

“Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars and let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars,” as Sinatra crooned.

One spring two decades ago we flew into what seemed like another planet – Las Vegas. We stayed on the Strip at The Mirage Hotel and Casino, whose major selling points were a daily erupting ‘Volcano’ and a ‘Secret Garden’, where we bonded with resident dolphins. Further highlights included renewing our vows at an Elvis wedding chapel (pink Cadillac, dry ice and a singalong with the King) and dinner at the place to be, Piero’s, which featured in Martin Scorsese’s Casino.

That mobster classic is celebrating its 30th anniversary. So many of its locations in the city have since bitten the dust, as has The Mirage, site for a new Hard Rock Hotel. The dolphin attraction had closed in 2022 after four had gone belly-up inside 10 months.

Meeting a Mirage dolphin
Putting on a show with Elvis

Through all this shape-shifting across Sin City Piero’s Italian Cuisine has survived, though its signature osso buco, fave of regular Frank Sinatra, hasn’t. You will find this braised veal shank on the bone, though, on the menu at Manchester’s Louis, a homage to vintage American-Italian cuisine, soundtracked naturally by ‘Ol Blue Eyes’, Dean Martin and their ilk. 

OK, the Spinningfields business district outside lacks the pizazz of Vegas, but it’s also free of the gangsters who frequented ‘The Leaning Tower’, Piero’s rebrand for Casino. Mirroring the restaurant’s own checkered associations (and I don’t mean the table cloths).

In contrast to owner Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) taking goreish exception to one customer in The Leaning Tower, our real life Thursday evening at Louis was an absolutely joyous celebration of a fantasy fifties America. And like the Permanently Unique group’s other recent project, Fenix, the place was mobbed (sic) by 7.30pm.

Sharon Stone and De Niro in Casino
Today’s Piero’s (much refurbed)

New York, not Las Vegas, is the prime inspiration. Ippokratis Anagnostelis, exec chef behind the Fenix’s Mykonos-inspired modern Greek cuisine, travelled there with co-founder Drew Jones to find restaurant role models… but Scorsese movies such as Casino and Goodfellas are undoubtedly a key influence on Louis, too.

Drew has admitted this: “Obviously there’s a dark side to those films, but take that away and the environment, the glamour, the clubs, the bars, they’re extremely luxurious.” As is Louis, a destination where folk are encourage to don their glad rags and wallow in the live music as part of the experience. Surely Robert De Niro, star of both films, would approve, as a serial restaurateur in more recent times?

Swish interior of Louis
Its signature osso buco

So does the cuisine here live up to the hype? The offering is far more exciting than the routine high street Italian served up at Carluccio’s, previous occupant of the unit. We were there by invitation to road test the new summer dishes, so I had to resist Osso Buco Revisited. Reminding myself it is, of course, a sharing dish.

Another change since our last visit – they are now allowing customers to photograph their experience. From the launch onwards on arrival punters were obliged to apply ‘fedora’ stickers to their phone for the duration. Removing mine afterwards ripped a chunk of leather off my case. Second visit, replacement purchased, I declined, still promising to obey their privacy edict.

This time round then gave me the chance to capture the beauty of the dishes served. Stand-outs were our starters. An egg yolk, tide of parmesan foam and a fin of crisp topping a spiced steak tartare on a sheet of lasagne (£24) sounds an odd combo but it tasted sublime. Ditto a substantial, gloriously glazed portion of sticky bourbon short rib with equally sticky mushrooms and curly crisps, this time of sweet potato (£22).

Sommelier Pasquale Moschettieri was busy wheeling around the Champagne trolley, the bubbly served in old school coupe glasses, of course. But the true vinous treasures lay in his wine sanctuary just behind us. Oh, the temptation. Serendipitously we had ordered a Nerello Mascalese from his native Sicily, so we became instant buddies. A classic volcanic red from the northern flank of Etna, velvety yet taut. A higher budget for your wine pairing? This is one Palermo boy’s offers you’d be mad to refuse.

Our mains were essentially superior comfort food. Classic Italian filtered through a North American emigre sensibility in a generous contemporary UK take. I had handmade cavatelli pasta smothered in a slow-seethed duck ragu (£30). Across the table Pollo alla Calabrese (50p cheaper) matched chicken breast with a sausage sauce on a bed of polenta. Satisfying both, but neither is likely to supplant in my affections dishes that remain on the menu such as rigatoni with vodka and tomato or the New York, USDA grade strip steak.

To close, we also shared exemplary chocolate tart and baked New York cheesecake (what else?) with shots of rather sumptuous house-made limoncello.

How did it compare with a very distant memory of Piero’s? This 2025 meal experience was surely superior. I suspect that moody downtown Vegas joint might have been resting on its celebrity laurels. In contrast, laid-back Louis has got me “under its skin”.

Louis, 3 Hardman Square, Manchester M3 3EB.

• As I finish this review/reminiscence I discover that after 43 years in existence Piero’s has just been sold to a new corporate owner with a bagel and doughnut empire. This shock move is in the wake of a violent squabble between Piero’s founder Freddie Glusman and his son Evan over substantial missing funds. It had to be in the script.

/by
, ,

Pip, Pearl and Josephine – forays into Prestwich, Chelsea and a certain Treehouse

Just 100 metres and a whole decade apart – Aumbry and The Pearl. But there’s a palpable bond between them on a balmy night along Bury New Road. For once this week Prestwich is spared the not-so-distant rumble of Oasis in Heaton Park but the rival shishes are sizzling in the Istanbul and Anatolian Grills. This is polyglot dining territory, but there’s a place for a ‘Modern British’ restaurant.

Until 2015 that role was occupied brilliantly by Mary-Ellen McTague’s award-winning Aumbry. After it closed, the site on the corner of Church Lane became burger joint Solita and is now Wallop cafe bar.

Change happens. Back in those days 425 Bury New Road was a computer repair shop. Now it’s a self-styled ‘British Dining Room’ called The Pearl, its dazzling blue exterior punctuated by founder Sam Taylor’s little Florentine peccadillo, a ‘wine serving hatch’. The bijou interior owes more to the classic Parisian bistro. 

I’ve been rolling with that French bistro renaissance recently, taking in terroir-driven establishments in Lyon, London’s Bouchon Racine, Camille and Café Francois, Bavette in Horsforth and more recently Chelsea’s Josephine Bouchon, of which more later. There is an Entente Cordiale with Prestwich’s Anglophone heritage going on here, I believe.

George, Matt and Jae at The Pearl

The Pearl – from Arnold Bennett to Matt Bennett

I used to come to The Pearl just to eat chef Ian Thomas’s Omelette Arnold Bennett. Now the kitchen has a new regime featuring three young chefs who’ve all seen service at Manchester’s Michelin-starred Mana. Head chef Matt Bennett looks impossibly young to have also worked at the legendary Gidleigh Park in Devon, but he has.

On Fridays and Saturdays, 5pm-9pm, Matt, George Webber and Jae Haney switch to à la carte. Their new summer menu was the perfect excuse to see if the Pearl remains a jewel. Saturday lunchtime (needs must as a suburban restaurant) the lunch ‘special’ was to be Oasis themed with involving pie specials and a pudding called Cigarettes and Alcohol, consisting of whisky, white chocolate and charcoal ash. On a fashion note, their ‘Yeah, Oui’ limited edition red cap in Isle of Wight red, celebrating the new menu, is preferable in every way to an overpriced bucket hat.

Pip the sustainable showcase for Mary-Ellen?

That band from Burnage came up in conversation two days before in the beyond-quirky environs of the Treehouse Hotel. This is a thrilling transformation of the brutalist Ramada Renaissance at the Cathedral end of Deansgate. Serendipitously, we were dining in its ground floor Pip restaurant, which is under the stewardship of the aforementioned Mary-Ellen McTague. Like The Pearl and Shaun Moffat’s wonderful Winsome Pip showcases great local suppliers and a very British culinary tradition. Her new hotel home is also committed to championing low-waste cooking. 

No, fans up for the BIG GIG weren’t primarily popping in for Mary-Ellen’s deconstructed Lancashire hotpot or the heavenliest of treacle tarts, but as our early evening server reported: `’quite a few will be in later”. A few days earlier Oasis ticket holders were also sighted in Hawksmoor, enjoying the remarkable value three course lunch for £26, which includes rump steak. But then Oasis has long been  about the beef between two brothers.

It has taken a while too for Mary-Ellen McTague to find the right stage. I’ve known her since she arrived back in her native North West after working for Heston Blumenthal. While she was still at Ramson’s in Ramsbottom I had the good fortune to dine with her, and get a kitchen tour, back at The Fat Duck. Then came Aumbry and later The Creameries in Chorlton, which heartbreakingly didn’t work out. A constant triumph for her, though, has been Eat Well, which she co-founded with friends Gemma Saunders and Kathleen O’Connor five years ago. It delivers around 2,500 meals a month, made by Manchester’s hospitality community. Meant to be a temporary response to a global pandemic, this fund-raising initiative continues to feed people in need.

Josephine Bouchon – near perfect Lyonnais corner house

Fulham Road Chelsea is hardly synonymous with deprivation. Michelin groupies may associate it with Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, which has held three stars for nearly a quarter of a century and where the Carte Blanche menu will set you back £260. The best of the rest on the scene had seemed to consist of swanky gastropubs. Until Josephine. It’s named after serial star gatherer Claude Bosi’s grandmother and is a slick but sympathetic homage to those bouchons (bistros) originally frequented by Lyon’s silk workers. Today’s real ones don’t offer the heritage glamour of Josephine but Bosi’s incarnation more than matches them, with less heaviness. 

Josephine’s sea bream crudo
The exquisite ‘bought-in’ terrine

After starters of terrine de campagne with cornichons (£17.50) and dorade marinée aux olives and citron (aka sea bream crudo, £15) we had the lapin à la moutarde – (rabbit in mustard and tarragon sauce) to share for £68. Definitely consisting off more than one whole bunny, it could have fed four, all of whom would have been swooning in delight, as we were. A £17.50 chocolate mousse to share, alas, just seemed one gustatory challenge too far. Next time. And surely will be… if we can tear ourselves away from our perennial Racine fetish. I liked the fact that the menu attributed that terrine, the equal of many I’ve had in Lyon, to London charcutier George Jephson. How very French.

The metropolitan bargains to be found here are a ‘Menu de Canut’ featuring simple Lyonnais specialities (£14.50 for two courses, £29.50 for three). There is also a daily changing Plat du Jour for £16.50). Stick to the £28 a bottle house wine and you won’t ‘faire sauter la banque’ as they say in French. In a further homage to the Lyon bouchons they measure that house wine (we had a very acceptable Rhone red) with a ruler to decide how much you pay.

The Pearl is on the cosy side
Matt (in that cap) with Sam

So did The Pearl live up to Josephine’s folksy finesse?

The red wine that accompanied our four à la carte courses in deepest Prestwich hailed from Sicily, but was prime example of local sourcing. Borgoleo is a 14 per cent Syrah produced from the vineyards of Filippo Zito’s family. These days you’ll find the former Midland French sommelier at the Failsworth wine shop/tasting room he runs with his wife Natasha. They provide other wines for The Pearl, but this, his own, is the one to go for, a complex bargain even at £60 a bottle.

It fitted our evening, which featured a large ‘snack’ of glazed lamb ribs with an exquisite red wine jus and a later main of lamb rack and loin, a fine dish but eclipsed by my ex-Dairy sirloin with hen of the woods mushrooms and a beef fat potato terrine. It was sourced inevitably from Littlewoods of Heaton Chapel. Incredible stuff.

I should by then have been ‘steaked out’ after a beef tartare. Despite the presence of lovage and smoked eel this dish was surprising unassertive; the same could not be said of its fellow starter where a slash of black garlic added oomph to a glorious croquette of Bury black pudding with apple compote and nasturtium. Modern British? Yes.

Milk bread is having its moment so no surprise when a few dinky slices of the kitchen’s own arrived with marmite butter; toasted it partnered, the tartare. Perhaps a raft of French toast under a chantilly blanket that came with Prestwich honey and peaches was a carbfest too far. But it was a generous feast.

The Pearl’s chocolate pavé
‘Peaches and cream’

Did Pip at the Treehouse climb the heights?

As at The Pearl, I kicked off with oysters – each time a modest trio. In Prestwich they were Scottish Cumbrae with a mignonette dressing and a squirt of Tabasco (£10 for three); at Pip I took the ferment liquor option with my Carlingfords (£4 each). We had considered the affordable four-course ‘Pip Mini Tasting Menu’,  available for dinner at £30 a head with a generous optional wine pairing at £20 each, but couldn’t resist the lure of the à la carte, which felt classic McTague. 

Each dish is recognisably a model of clarity. Nothing superfluous on the plate, core flavour the foremost consideration. I had wondered if all this might be diluted in the context of running a whole day hotel catering operation (there is a separate team for events).

Not on the evidence of this particular meal, an antidote to ‘fine dining’. Sardines on toast as a starter is almost an act of daring, but it feels just right. Deconstructed Lancashire hotpot sounds a mite Masterchef poncey? None of it. The regional one-pot dish is translated into a huge, beautifully seasoned Barnsley chop on a bed of melting hotpot potatoes, the dish given seasonal vigour by an abundance of minty peas and broad beans. Classic cauliflower cheese went well with this and my open lobster and crab thermidor pie, topped with a lemon hollandaise, its lushness offset by grilled gem lettuce. 

Treacle tart
Flourless chocolate cake

Among my fondest memories of Aumbry were the puddings and here both a treacle tart, earl grey and bergamot and a flourless chocolate cake with fennel cream were sublime.

Little things linger. So many vapid amuse bouches about. But here we had kicked off with split pea chips with mushroom ketchup. All the ketchups, pickles and ferments are made in-house; it’s symptomatic of what today’s new wave Brit cooks are up to. Who needs an elaborate over-reduced sauce? Not that well-grounded Josephine Bouchon dallies with such Cordon Bleu niceties either. 

After three such well pitched meals, what is the French for common ground?

Fact file

While in London to review Josephine Bouchon I stayed at The Z Hotel Leicester Square, 3-5, Charing Cross Rd, London WC2N 4HS, latest site for this stylish but affordable boutique lodging group. You couldn’t be closer to the West End action, yet the  95-room property nestles in a quiet corner beside the National Portrait Gallery. Indeed our extra comfort Club Queen room looked out on the Gallery entrance.


/by
, ,

Exploding the minerality ‘myth’… plus expert guides to great wine regions

You wait all your days for a debunking of the minerality’ in wine and then two come along. Both books, just published by the Academie du Vin Library, take a genuine tilt at accepted assumptions of terroir. 

The subtitle of Taste The Limestone, Smell The Slate by Alex Maltman (£35) is a mite off-putting: “A geologist wanders through the world of wine” Did my favourite wine writer,  Andrew Jefford, put me at ease with his summation? ‘“Rocks and soils haunt our thinking about wine. We see links, sniff origins, taste connections, digest differences. Is this cause and effect – or fantasy? Alex Maltman is ghostbuster-in-chief. This wide-ranging and clearly reasoned book shines a torch through cobwebs.”

Cobwebs initially entangled me as I waded through Professor Maltman’s links between terroir, geology and microbiology, but I was gripped once he put into scientific context wine writing’s insistence that minerals in the vineyard bedrock contribute to the eventual taste in the bottle.So many other factors are at play. His conclusion: ‘minerality’ is a pseudo-science.

Inescapable mind. In a recent copy of Decanter magazine Beverley Blanning MW, author of a new book on Wines of the Loire Valley, reviewed eight Sancerres from that limestone-clay terroir with a hint of flint in the east of the region. The Domaine Vacheron sample is spared, but in her short evaluations of the other seven ‘mineral’ features seven times, ‘minerality’ three.

Spain expert Sarah-Jane Evans
Sunny Hodges – scientific approach

So what does have a major impact according to Maltman? Check out the chapter, Four Elephants in the Wine Room”. The four key factors are soils, rootstock selection, choice of yeasts, and ambient factors affecting taste perceptions.

Book number two, which wields its debunking scythe much further, is Sunny Hodge’s The Cynic’s Guide To Wine (£25). As the title suggests it’s a rational antidote to romantic grape tosh, making use of the writer’s scientific background (in mechanical engineering) and running his two London wine bars – Diogenes the Dog and Aspen & Meursault.

Hodge is vituperous about the bullshit of wine speak: “‘The more we talk about wine in that way, the less we learn about wine. The more we understand why this tastes so “green-appley” because of the natural malic acid; why your Merlots and Cabernets taste so peppery, because of the pyrazines… I know it’s very technical food talk, but the more we talk about it normally, the less smoke and mirrors there are.” It’s a more approachable book than Maltman’s, ranging wider. I particularly liked the final chapter exploring taste perceptions and neurology.

I also enjoyed the sense of genuine personal engagement in the writing. Take this passage after he has pointed out that almost all rocks and minerals are essentially tasteless and odourless: “It is hard to believe that we conjured aroma associations with certain metals and rocks out of nowhere. I can myself recall the most distinct smell of lead from an unfortunate turn of events in Peckham.

“In my early twenties (he is now 35) I ended up with a couple of lead air rifle bullets lodged in the back of my head and jaw when I was the victim of a clichéd London robbery following a skate filming session… To this day the smell and taste of that alien object under my skin is unforgettable. How is possible that smell didn’t exist?”

Iberian spectrum – Priorat in Catalunya
Sanlucar’s manzanilla vineyards in Andalucia

After such polemics a recognisable vineyard journey from one of the great English wine writers. Sarah-Jane Evans’ The Wines of Northern Spain has long been an essential guide to regions that are among my favourites. Now seven years on comes The Wines of Central and Southern Spain (Academie du Vin Library, £35), which takes us from from Catalunya to Cadiz via the Levante and ends on the wilder shores of the Balearics. Trendy Sierra Gredos doesn’t make the cut, but the omission is slight when there is much else to savour in this encyclopaedic evaluation of arguably Europe’s most interesting wine country. In particular I love they way she tackles the recent transformation of traditionally hidebound sherry country in Andalucia,

Also new in the same series is The Wines of California (£35) by Elaine Chukan Brown. It is an in-depth look at what is the world’s fourth largest producer of wine, focusing not just on her base, Napa, and Sonoma but other viticulture areas emerging against the challenge of climate change, drought and the threat of wildfires. 

The book, heavyweight in every sense at nearly 500 pages, is divided into three major sections. The first presents the key ideas that help make sense of California wine as a whole, including the history of the state’s vineyards and how the topography delivers California’s climatic and soil conditions. The second tackles each major region in turn, spotlighting the most significant and interesting producers. A final section discusses the future of the industry across the state.

The Smart Traveller’s Wine Guide Series offer a pocket-sized, well-illustrated  wealth of information that can enhance a road trip or stay in any region. The latest volumes, each just £12.99, live up to that billing – Tuscany by Paul Caputo and Rioja by Fintan Kerr  (each £12.99). Both had me scanning cheap flights over.

Image credits: Chateauneuf du Pape galets (Megan Mallen); Sarah-Jane Evans and Sunny Hodge (Academie du Vin Library); Priorat (Antonio M Romero Dorado) and Sanlucar (Til F Teek).

/by
, ,

An alternative Greek legend – Fenix pairs red snapper with mango and fills dolmades with wagyu

These days I eat out less than I did. All relative maybe. But I do cook tenaciously at home on the back of canny sourcing and our own garden bounty (again only relative). And, of course, vicarious pleasure is always there when I see chefs and restaurants I was among the very first to champion picking up plaudits. Great to see a national critic finally make it to Bavette Bistro in Horsforth and laud it to the heavens. Equally welcome is the universal praise for the great Shaun Moffat at Winsome (bring back the wild boar Barnsley chop please). Amazing but not surprising news that Pignut, Helmsley (shortly to be Pignut at the Hare in Scawton) is one of five restaurants shortlisted for the Estrella Damm Sustainability Awards).

In contrast, some eating places I have loved from the start suffer from perceptions of glam overload, which detracts from the food on offer. Take Fenix in Manchester, a pioneer in the happening quarter around Aviva Studios.

Fenix’s mythic bar
A dining space that says Med

In my original 2022 review for Manchester Confidential I couldn’t help teasing about its mythical Mykonos persona while being wowed by its contemporary fine dining take on Greek food. I’ve been back several times and never been disappointed, the latest to sample its 2025 summer menu and a range of superb Greek wines. 

There was me, a huge fan of the Thymiopoulos red range, centring on the Xinomavro grape, and I’d forgotten how good their Malagouzia-Assyrtiko white blend from Macedonia can be, melding the full-on fruit of the former with the saline minerality of the latter. Lovely but it was eclipsed by a limpid red from Crete. Nicos Karavitakis has worked wonders in squeezing rich cherry flavours out of the pale Liatiko grape without losing the fresh acidity.

I missed the original Fenix press invitation because I was then eating my way down the Rhone Valley (OK I do get out), but answered the ‘do come along later’ call. And wasn’t disappointed. A co-production, as always by Athens-based exec chef Ippokratis Anagnostelis and in-situ head chef chef Zisis Giannouras (the one with the heroic beard), it offered no dramtic over-haul but some delicious tweaks.

Which chef created this…
…cream of the Crèmes?


Wagyu Dolmakadi, stuffed vine leaves with ‘that’ beef’ didn’t sound me but was delicious, albeit at £24.50 for a trio of the tiny wraps. Even better was charred Calamari with taramasalata cream and lime dressing. Spicy red snapper dressed in aji panca with fresh mango and olive oil felt less authentically Greek, but that’s the point of Fenix. The menu is filtered through an innovative modern Greek sensibility. It doesn’t always work. An over-sweet white sesame dressing on a broccolini side did no favours for the the robata tenderloin with potato terrine and black olive. 

Mediterranean dish of the dinner was tiger prawns on a tangle of linguini in a saffron and tomato crustacean broth, infused with a hint of Pernod. Maybe more Amalfi than Athens, but who cares?

An old favourite remains irresistible among the desserts – the quartet of  Greek baklava ice cream, Greek Tsoureki ice cream, yuzu-lemon sorbet and chocolate Valrhona sorbet. Definitely a trencherful for two to share. It arrived plus another new dish that’s definitely a star in the Fenix firmament – cinnamon fruit crumble and a caramelised apple crème brûlée.

Don’t forget the drinks of the Gods too (here I go again) on the cocktail list. Once again I pre-prandially tested my strength on Hercules’ Eighth Trial. For £16.50 you get an awesome back story as well as a steamingly good presentation. “Son of Zeus and Alcmene, divine monster-slaying hero Heracles was forced to undertake a series of trials. The eighth was capturing a herd of man-eating and fire-breathing horses from Diomedes. His victory is immortalised in our watermelon and whisky pre-dinner sipper.”

Fenix Restaurant and Bar, The Goods Yard Building Goods Yard Street, Manchester M3 3BG. 0161 646 0231. 

/by
, ,

Nightingale season, radical seeds and troubled dreams in sparkling Sussex

Never meet your heroes, they say. Does it help if they are not at the very top of your worshipful bucket list? Take this random trio – folk singer and nightingale champion Sam Lee, revolutionary political philosopher Thomas Paine and Limerick-born Dermot Sugrue, described by his wife as the ‘Don Corleone of English wine’. I’m  a big fan of all three, all of whom were integral, in their different ways, to a spring visit to Lewes, East Sussex. 

Sam Lee
Thomas Paine
Dermot Sugrue

The roots of our big wedding anniversary break lay in Sam’s Singing With Nightingales project. It felt like the perfect present for a spouse in tune with all things avian and Shakespeare (the special theme of our chosen night in a ‘secret’ Sussex wood).

Each spring several thousand nghtingales make the long migration from Sub-Saharan Africa to reside in southern England and indulge in all-night mating ritual. The chance to hear the song, from the male only, long celebrated in myth, poetry and folk culture was irresistible. Sam, who has himself written a book on the bird, describes it as “an act of immersive theatre and ritual, both otherworldly and yet something we might collectively have done since the dawn of humans. This communion with the more than human world reminds us that we are nature and nature is in us all.

Gathered around the campfire
The nightingale quest

Our unique experience encompassed a bell tent for the night, chummy campfire supper, a lutanist, Shakespeare from a Globe Theatre story teller and a song plus eco rallying cry from charismatic Sam; then towards the witching hour a single file promenade into the dark woods. The goal, achieved – to hunker down by a hedge to eavesdrop on the ecstatic piping of a nightingale. So few left, a 90 per cent decline in the UK since the sixties, so it felt a magical encounter. All too brief. What was it Keats concluded his great Ode with?  “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?  Fled is that music:— Do I wake or sleep?”

At the close, in the deep darkness, Sam and his musical guests duetted softly with the invisible bird. You can get a feel from a 2021 EP how it sounds. Nothing, though can match the real thing. Each year the window of opportunity is short, scarcely six weeks. I highly recommend making the trek to Sussex (or a newer site in Bedfordshire)). Just 40 folk are allowed for each session.

Dreams come true
Bee Tree in the distance
Bonkers on ice

The Trouble with Dreams, the beauty of English bubbles

The same number, 40, is the guest maximum for Sugrue Sundays, a series of alfresco summer  lunches at Sugrue South Downs winery, eight miles north of Lewes. After an aperitif among the vines, a four course lunch is cooked over vine cuttings and served en plein air with views of the Bee Tree Vineyard and the South Downs. The August 10 lunch sold out in a flash, understandably with kitchen legends Mark Hix and Henry Harris doing the cooking (I’m on a waiting list).

The wines, made by Dermot Sugrue, are an equal attraction. His Champagne method The Trouble with Dreams was recently named Britain’s best sparkling wine, ahead of the likes Nyetimber and Wiston, both of which once benefitted from Dermot as their contract winemaker.

Since 2023 the genial Irishman, now 47, has been master of his own vinous destiny, thanks to backers such as actor Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey and Paddington) and Robin Hutson, founder of The Pig boutique hotel collection (Soho House and Hotel du Vin are also in his cv). Evidence of burgeoning ambition is everywhere at the Bee Tree HQ, run by Dermot and his Croatian-born wife Ana. What was once a side project is now the real deal.

En route for Lewes, we popped in for a tasting with the pair’s marketing director, Callum Edge. Limerick (where Dermot began brewing at 14) met Cork (my wife, proud of her hibernian heritage) in the state of the art winery in front of the map charting his 11 hectare Sussex empire. Five vineyards with differing terroirs provide the Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier and Pinot Noir for the sparklers that have made is reputation.

Storrington Priory Vineyard has a special place in the legend. The Trouble With Dreams was tangentially born there on a plot planted to make wine for the resident monastic order. When the inaugural vintage was wiped out by birds, the Prior, Fr Paul McMahon took it on the chin, saying “That’s the trouble with dreams.”

As long time Trouble fans, we bought a bottle of the 2020 to celebrate our big anniversary. Not in the bell tent; back home in the North, lightly chilled in crystal glasses.

The Trouble With Dreams is available by the glass for £20 at Manchester’s Michelin-starred Mana; on the same list Sugrue’s Cuve Boz Blanc de Blancs 2015 is by the bottle at £210. I bought mine from the Wine Society for £65.

Given 36 months on the lees, it is steely and fresh and quite wonderful. It too has scooped awards, but Sugrue’s latest sensation has undoubtedly been – take a deep breath – a still white called BONKERS Zombie Robot Alien Monsters from the Future Ate My Brain (sur lie). This multi-vintage solera Chardonnay, sold out in a heartbeat. It was  is the result of a blend of Chardonnay from the near perfect 2022 vintage which was lightly oxidised, with fruit from 2023. The blend was aged in large, old French oak barrels and was taut and refreshing with complexity emerging down the bottle. The next expression will be released in late 2025. You’d be bonkers to ignore it. And watch this space for a 100 per cent Pinot Noir in the pipeline.

The White Hart
Lewes Castle

Does the ghost of Thomas Paine haunt the Hart?

Lewes is synonymous with tumultuous Bonfire Night celebrations, marking both the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the 17 Protestant martyrs burned at the stake in Lewes during the reign of Queen Mary. Political dynamite was also fashioned in the town; Thomas ‘Rights of Man’ Paine, key figure in both the French and American Revolutions, lived at Bull House from 1768 to 1774 and honed his debating skills at  the Headstrong Club held in The White Hart on the High Street. Did the historical revolutionary zeal rub off on these seekers of nightingale song? Our room in the latest incarnation of the hotel was across the first floor landing from the Headstrong’s meeting room, lovingly preserved by Heartwood Inns during a £4m spend. As are the timbery creaks in a building dating back to the 1560s.

Paine’s Lewes home
Bread and revolution

The town, radical chic to the core even with its hilltop castle and well-heeled retirees, does not neglect Paine. There’s a rival pub named after him and while visiting the excellent Friday Food Market we spotted a mural of the young firebrand in the Market Tower. Bull House, his residence while working in the town as an exciseman, has recently re-opened to the public as a museum (Thursdays and Saturdays, 11am-3pm). In 2026, Thomas Paine: Legacy and its partners will launch a Sussex-wide programme of events to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Some two decades after Paine’s time there Lewes’s most famous institution came into being. Family-owned Harvey’s https://www.harveys.org.uk/ still dominates the Ouse river bank and on the attractive Cliffe High Street there’s a large store flogging merchandise and the range of their award-winning beers. The true classic that never fails to delight is Harvey’s Sussex Best Bitter. It is crafted from four local hop varieties, Downs water and a 60-year-old yeast strain.

The best place to sample it is The Lewes Arms, an institution for over 200 years up on Mount Place. Moving with the times, it’s home to idiosyncratic events such as the World Pea Throwing Championships, Spaniel Racing and the ancient pastime of Dwyle Flunking (look it up). or you could just order a heritage grain, wood-fired pizza with your Harvey’s and seek out the hidden garden up top. Lewes is full of such hidden corners, making it a delight to ramble around.

221st century craft beer boasts its own stronghold. It’s well worth the 15 minute walk out of town to Beak’s brewery tap, set under a white chalk cliff. They don’t spare the hops here for hazy NEIPAs and the like, but the result is consistently impressive – at a price. Great branding too.

Best foodie destination? Definitely, Dill,  just awarded a Michelin Bib Gourmand for chef Dan Cooper’s globally inspired small plates, which have the added virtue of being quite substantial.

Oysters at Dill
Beak brewery/taproom

FACT FILE

Singing With Nightingales

The 2026 season will run from April 10 to May 28. Dates for the season will be announced and tickets will go on general sale, maximum 40 per session, in November 2025.

Sugrue South Downs, Bee Tree Vineyard, South Rd, Wivelsfield Green, Haywards Heath RH17 7QS. Visits by appointment. There are also Bee Experience Days, exploring the life cycle of the bee, nectar foraging, and honey production to a full hive inspection

The White Hart, 55 High St, Lewes BN7 1XE.

For further details on a fascinating town go to Visit Lewes. Further afield there’s the South Downs Way and Bloomsbury literary shrines, Monk’s House, Rodmell and Charleston – homes respectively of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell.

/by