 My fellow blogstress, Violet Hatfields, alluded in this space the other week to the recent opening of a South African restaurant on the Thames by St.Paul's. It was purely by coincidence that I found myself at High Timber - eventually - last week for a dinner based around a tasting of the excellent wines of their countrymen, Meerlust.
(I say “eventually”, because it is in a site that wins hands down in the "Hardest-To-Find" category of my own, personal restaurant awards. Go to the Wobbly Bridge and walk East along the river - any other attempted route will fail.)
Some of these wine tastings are what I imagine it might be like to go to a swingers' party, only without the sex: so, a fairly innocuous exercise in getting drunk with some total strangers. But with a leavening of gallows humour and a general sense that, knowing we'd have to hang around for a while, as it were, we might as well try and have a laugh.
(I was slightly alarmed when the chef, Justin, at one point told us that he liked to relax between the lunch and dinner services by "messing around with a £5,000 vacuum pump" they'd had installed in the kitchen. Turned out that it wasn’t THAT sort of vacuum pump - they don't cost anything like five grand anyway - but a "sous vide" thingummyjig that modern chefs use for poaching a chicken breast for three hours and two minutes at 102.4° and that sort of mallarkey.)
I have only recently – and that by chance – started to address my status as a complete ignoramus on the subject of South African wine and I’ve become something of a fan (but not yet of pinotage, I should add). Vergelegen (try to pronounce it with as much guttural gusto as you can muster) is one of the oldest and grandest producers (they don’t grow any pinotage) and their Bordeaux-blend “Red” is – at £24-28 – one of the best-value wines I’ve had this year. It would fail to shine only in the grandest company.
Meanwhile, if there’s a chirpier cheapie than Tesco’s NV South African Red for three-odd quid, I’d be very happy to try it. In-between, and again at Tesco – OK, so I write about wine for their mag but that just means I know their range quite well – Flagstone’s “Dragon Tree” is an awful lot of wine, again in a Bordeaux blend, for a tenner.
Meerlust turned out to be no wallflowers either. Winemaker Chris Williams (good luck with the MW results< Chris!) gave us his flagship “Rubicon” red, which is one of SA’s stars in the £15-£20 slot, but I was most impressed by his pinot noir which, although only in its third vintage, shows oodles of class. I’d throw my keys on the table for it any time.
By Peter Grogan
Taken from www.spectator.co.uk
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