Berlin: Currywurst and Radical Nostalgia

Attention to detail: Restaurant Tim Raue

At Tim Raue’s Michelin-starred restaurant in Berlin’s once-dilapidated but now thriving Kreuzberg district, a stone’s throw from Checkpoint Charlie, the lobby is dominated by a large picture by the artist Olivia Steele. It’s a classic technicolour nuclear mushroom cloud with the words ‘The End’ picked out in red neon, movie-credit style. The decor is a bizarre (and oddly relaxing) mix of Prussian blue and fulgent pink. The floor is made of a specialised ultra-durable vulcanized compound, more commonly used for warehouses and industrial complexes.

  If you’re getting the impression Raue pays attention to detail, you’re right. Even the fly-swats in the kitchen are colour-coordinated pink. Raue, born and raised in Kreuzberg (his CV includes a violent stint in a street gang - the area, with high immigration in the 1970s, was notorious for its poverty and instability) has the compelling focus and eccentricity common to most top chefs. His publicist cheerfully told me his sous-chefs regard him with a mix of ‘fear and respect’.

   While Raue is typical of the new generation of Berlin chefs in that he’s striving to create a new style while paying healthy respect to tradition, there’s nothing typically “German” about his food. It is Asian-inspired, a mix of Thai, Chinese and Japanese culinary traditions. Raue says he wants to ‘attain the purity’ of eastern cuisine, and eschews all wheat, gluten and starch. Dishes like crayfish with tangerine and smoked pepper, or jasmin pigeon with peanut and fig, have an intensity of flavour combined with lightness and elegance you find very seldom, however many Michelin stars on the door. Each dish is created around ‘Spiciness, acidity and natural sweetness. I’m not looking for quantity but for this rollercoaster of sensations.’ Raue insists he is traditional – ‘Chinese cuisine is the most ancient in the world – they were using sous-vide 2000 years ago’ – it’s just not German traditional. ‘I’m not looking to cook “German”,’ he says, putting the word in quotation marks. ‘I love Asia but I am a native of Berlin. You can see in these dark blue Prussian colours, and in the way I work, which is very precise.’

    This combination is fitting for a city that fosters creativity. Berliners are open to new things. There’s no industry here. The banks are in Frankfurt, there is no downtown financial district, but plenty of advertising and artists. And, as Raue points out, ‘there are a lot of people who are wealthy and who need an audience, and places to entertain themselves.’

The End by Olivia Steele

    For all its radical self-consciousness, though (much of Berlin is a riot of grafitti and scruffy, hippyish chic) there’s something touchingly old-fashioned about this extraordinary city and its refusal to leave the past behind. History is literally set into the stones here. The route of the infamous Wall is marked out in a double row of cobblestones; cemented into doorways all over the city are tiny brass plaques commemorating their Jewish occupants. ‘Here lived Elsa Guttentag, born 1883,’ says one, ‘Deported 29.11.1942. Died in Auschwitz’. Older Berliners talk about the upheavals the city has experienced – the Nazis, the Communists – and the young are fully aware of their city’s legacy.

      Berliners are mindful too of their rich gastronomic heritage. This is what makes the city’s restaurants so compelling – they refuse to leave it alone. They adjust, and tinker, and re-invent. We’re not going to forget our history, good or bad, Berlin cooks seem to say, but we’re certainly not going to let it get in the way. One chef, Marco Müller at the Michelin-starred Weinbar Rutz, makes this explicit: written at the top of his menu are the words Die rettung der Deutschen esskultur (‘The rescue of German cuisine’).

    Muller’s mission is ‘to make everything new but classic’. In his mind, ‘People like going back to what they know, finding flavours they cherished when they were young. So we’re open to new things but we’re looking back to what is comfortable. But this is not your grandmother’s kitchen.’ Indeed it’s not. In contrast to the menu, the setting is ultra-modern, each dish delicate, tiny, the essence of modern Michelin style. Starters of neukollner schinkenknacker, hambel-leberworscht (neukolln sausage and liver sausage) and schweinebauch (pork belly), main courses of blutwurst (blood sausage), Holstein ox shoulder, and other classic German cuts - accompanied by one of the best wine lists in Berlin. Contrast is all: pork belly and blood sausage may sound classically, heftily German, but the meat is reduced to its essence – a mouthful of leberworscht is intense and flavoursome, but it’s only an echo of the great platefuls Muller’s grandmother would have served up.

    German wine is the perfect foil for this kind of food. Germany’s climate, the slate soils and vertiginous sloping vineyards of its finest wine regions produce wines with abundant minerality, bracing acids, rich fruit and low alcohol levels. Chefs resolutely promote their country’s wines: in a week’s worth of dining in Berlin, I hardly saw a non-German wine. 

   At Volt, the industrial-chic restaurant in a former electricity sub-station in Kreuzberg, every German wine region is represented on chef Matthias Gleiss’ list. With one of his signature dishes, a succulent grey mullet with artichoke risotto, he served an aromatic, spicy grauburgunder (pinot gris) from Weingut Klostermühle in Nahe. Another dish, a tranch of char with peas, mango and horseradish, is matched with a silvaner from Weingut Wagner Stempel in Rheinhessen. The pungent saltiness of the fish was offset by the wonderful contrast of sweet mango and delicately hot horseradish pannacotta, the whole complemented by the very same flavours in the wine: tropical fruit anchored by brisk acids.

   Tradition and modernity, radical nostalgia: again and again in Berlin one finds the contrast between the enthusiastic embracing of new flavours and foods, and the urge to hold onto the past. ‘It’s in sync with the economic crisis,’ Gleiss said: harking back to better times. But there’s a desire to look forward as well. At the studiedly trendy Restaurant Mani in Prenzlauer Berg, in the old East Berlin, chef Martin Schaninger describes his cuisine as ‘a virtual voyage from Tel Aviv to Paris’ and serves everything from tapas to spiced lamb patties. But he still has to deal with that conservative streak: even Berliners aren’t quite ready for tapas. ‘Shared dishes are quite a new idea here. Germans can be a bit picky about sharing.’

  Everywhere you look though, there is something new. It might be the Nhow Hotel, all mirrored glass outside and blobby pink décor within, designed to attract the international music crowd (so far they’ve had Katie Mehlua and Public Enemy) and where the chef creates Red Bull cocktails with clouds of dry ice. Or it might be the Judische Madchen Schule in Auguststrasse, in the heart of the former East Berlin. A Jewish girls’ school, under the Nazis it became desperately overcrowded as Jewish children were forced to leave the state schools (the walls are lined with poignant photos of little girls squashed three to a desk) then it gradually emptied as families were deported. Now the handsome, airy, 19^th century building is home to galleries and restaurants. At the fast-food end is Mogg & Melzer, whose pastrami sandwiches are made in authentic New York style with beef imported from America. They are superb, the meat meltingly tender, accompaniments such as cucumber pickled in salt (not vinegar – it gives a sweeter flavour) spot on.

Cosima von Bonin:  Miss Riley (2007), in Pauly Saal

Along the corridor is Pauly Saal, whose chef Siegfried Danler explained his fusion of old-fashioned German cuisine with lighter, modern touches. ‘In Germany after the war the important thing was to feed people, so food was as filling as possible – as much sausage, meat and potatoes as you could get.’

One of Danler’s signature dishes, put bluntly, is meat and potatoes: pot-roast beef with purée potatoes and steamed herb-mushrooms. But that’s all it has in common with stolid post-war fare. The beef is thin-sliced, garnished with a sauce of mushroom, walnut oil, chives and shallots – it’s robust, yet delicate.

    But what of real German cooking? Forget delicacy and starch-free Asian fusion, where are the lederhosen-stretching, button-popping, cheek-reddening platefuls that have to be washed down with steins of cold beer rather than sips of riesling? Where’s the currywurst, that strange and ubiquitous modern hybrid of hotdog, ketchup and curry sauce, best eaten standing up at one of the dozens, hundreds, of imbiss (fast food) kiosks around the city?

   Well, you can get currywurst on any corner – or at self-consciously downmarket emporia like Curry36 in Kreuzberg (which is cheerful, cheap, and about as genuinely German as a Soho fish and chip shop is British). For a more authentic street feel, locals flock to Burgermeister’s stand-up tables under the arches at Schlesisches Tor station. Here the ingredients are well-sourced, there are tofuburgers for vegetarians, the meat is excellent, the sauces homemade and arrestingly piquant. The finest example of the style is considered the currywurst and crispy shredded potato at Witty’s, across the road from the KaDeWe department store, in Wittenbergplatz. I’m not a connoisseur but the Witty’s did seem to have an edge – there was genuine meat in that sausage (when often it can seem to have a higher percentage of rusk filler than protein), and the potato was deliciously hot and crispy.

   Even currywurst has had a modern, upmarket makeover. There are places like the brand-new Meisterstück, just off Freidrichstrasse, which sources its hundreds of organic, handmade brats and würsts from all over Germany, and it has an ever-changing beer list that covers a dozen pages of the menu. Here you can choose your sausages from every corner of the country – nürnberger, irschenberger, coburger, duck, salmon or turkey sausage, currywurst with a range of different mustards, horseradish, and different traditional cabbage dishes, from sauerkraut, the classic pungent cured cabbage, Bavarian coleslaw and white cabbage with wasabi – hot enough to need several swallows of beer to wash it down. Each variety of meat  is cooked over wood burners, and the large, barn-like building is filled with the enticing aromas of wood smoke.

  Berlin has myriad means of gastronomic seduction, and one of the most compelling is the magnificent food hall at the KaDeWe department store. To say it is an Aladdin’s cave of food is to do it an injustice. Aromatic acres of cold cabinets groan with every type of German and international delicacy, from Serrano ham to foie gras, a cornucopia of wursts, close-packed trays of florentines, petit fours and törtchen, heart-stopping ranks of chocolates, pralinen and trüffelen in a hundred different flavours, pungent cheeses in crowded profusion, fruits, vegetables, there are oyster bars and wine bars, all under the soaring glass roof on the sixth floor of the huge building. It makes Selfridges or Harrods look like a village shop.

Turkish market at Maybachufer in Neukölln

   There’s a different kind of profusion to be found in the markets. The city is home to the largest Turkish community outside Turkey, and no place paints a better picture of this than the Tuesday and Friday Turkish market at Maybachufer in Neukölln. Stretching for hundreds of metres along the canal, with the heady, bustling atmosphere of a souk, the Türkischer Markt has aromatic Turkish breads, olives, vine leaves, heaving mounds of watermelons, cherries, a dozen different kinds of pepper, forests of dill and coriander and whatever else is in season. There are shoes, umbrellas, beads, garish tee-shirts and every kind of ethnic gewgaw.

  A wonderful place to spend an hour or two, but thirsty work, so we searched out a beer on the terrace of the eccentrically nautical AnkerKlause bar. Opposite, on the other side of the canal, market-goers sat with coffee and newspapers at tables set out under the trees. There’s nothing more charming than a canalside café in the sun – and it’s a peculiarity of Berlin that even the most popular spots are uncrowded: on a fine Friday in June, by a bustling, touristy market, at mid-morning, there was no scramble for a seat.

Larry Clark exhibition, Postfuhramt, Oranienburger Straße

It’s even more notable when you consider how Berliners love café culture. In Prenzlauer, the district of East Berlin that was colonised by artists and buskers and is now rapidly gentrifying, places to eat and drink jostle each other on the pavements. A stroll down Prenzlauer Allee and its by-streets shows what this part of Berlin is, was, and will be. Here you will find Indian fish thali restaurants, milk-and-yoghurt bars, delectable cake shops like Patissier Guido Fuhrmann where you can learn to make Süßigkeiten (wonderful lollies Willy Wonka would be proud of), or avant-garde Hochzeitstorten (richly decorated wedding cake). This is progress: just off Knaackstrasse is a Robert Lindner, a branch of the very expensive, very upmarket delicatessen, which looks absolutely in the right place. No wonder rents have doubled in the last few years.

'High in the sky, dazzlingly bright': the Nhow Hotel

   The kind of people who can afford higher rents also invest in their neighbourhood. They want clean parks and friendly cafes, places like Café Anna Blume, only open a few years but famous already, with a broad expanse of pavement tables where locals sit with their Mutschel – the sweet star-shaped roll that goes so well with strong hot coffee.

  The Danish architect Jan Gehl measures a city by its public spaces: the more pleasant it is to walk around, the happier the city. In Berlin, one strolls. Our last day dawned cloudless, and we determined to photograph the famous Badeschiff at Arena Berlin, the urban beach and swimming pool, which is decorous by day but later on – by all accounts – is the scene of Caberet-style high-jinks, being part of a run-down warehouse complex that houses some lively nightclubs. In Gorlitzer Park, where couples sat cross-legged, their faces towards the sun, dog-walkers ambled and joggers padded by. The trees, still fresh and early-summer green, shaded a collection of ramshackle riverfront dwellings, some of them with rustic balconies reflected in the water. A pair of swans floated imperially around, dipping their beaks in the weeds. You could barely hear the sound of traffic on the three-lane Stralauer Allee a hundred yards away. But you could see the future: the mirrored sides of the cantilevered box that is the penthouse of the Nhow Hotel, high in the sky, dazzlingly bright.

[This article first appeared in Food and Travel magazine]

‘Is there a silver lining? No. It's devastating’

Nyetimber, Yquem, Rieussec, Chateau Hourtin-Ducasse in the Medoc… all announced they wouldn’t make any wine from the 2012 vintage. Wickham Vineyards in Hampshire has gone bust – they expected 105 tonnes of 2012 and got five tonnes, and had a shortfall almost as bad in 2011. Arguably they were daft to buy 15 defunct Threshers shops and start a chain called Wine Shak, but that doesn’t take away from the misery of losing a year’s crop.

Arguably also the likes of Nyetimber and Yquem can cope with a dropped year… but then again, it’s still hard. If you’ve been in a wine region at harvest, or around a coop, especially, and seen the vignerons queuing down the lane on clattering tractors with an entire year’s work on the trailer – it makes you realise just how dependent on the seasons the business is.

This is what one Bordeaux vigneron said about vintage 2012: 'It is really quite devastating for us financially to lose such a significant percentage of our harvest after a full year's work, but then the whole team feels it, not just the proprietor. The tractor drivers, the vineyard staff and cellar hands all share the emotional cost of the catastrophe and so we all suffer together.

‘We have worked all year and in all weathers to manage the pruning, the green-works, and to carry out the treatments and so we have incurred all the expenses. There are also no savings in a tough year, as bad weather only means more money needs to be spent in the vineyard, but now our margin has gone as we have so little wine in barrel and cuvee.

‘Is there a silver lining? No, even though we will not now need to buy as many bottles, labels or corks; but how will we supply and keep all our customers happy, let alone the bank manager, who I had hoped would finance a new tractor this year?’

Between Trafalgar and Waterloo, superb 200-year-old Cognac

I had the oldest wine I’ve ever tasted on Tuesday – a Cognac produced between Trafalgar and Waterloo. Jack Aubrey would have known it.

The Renault Grande Fine Champagne Cognac Reserve 1810 goes on sale at Christies today with an estimate of around £2000 – a mere pinprick beside the £80k David Elswood and his boys are hoping for for the case of Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle 61 (‘unquestionably one of the greatest wines made in the 20^th century’ RP; ‘priceless now’ MB), or the £5000 estimate on the 1938 Macallan Glenlivet, or the £15k for the Glenfiddich 50-year-old…

Looks like a magnum here...

What a wonderful 200-year-old mouthful it was, what fulgent light gold-and-chestnut colour, and what a splendid nose of cream and caramel, dense figs, honey and prunes all layered (enrobé as the French say) in dry aromatic cedar, a Victorian cigar box where pot pourri has been kept. A box where sweets compacted lie, sherry-like, reminiscent of old PX…

The palate had more dried rose petals, citrus and orange zest, and incredibly youthful honey, caramel, toffee, unctuous sweetness and spice. Impossible to believe its age – if you had this blind you would swear it was less than 50 years old. That's to do with the alcohol - at least 40% the experts round the table said - there was a pronounced heft of alcohol on the end palate - not a burn, but a very definite presence, amazing for something so old.

The wine is part of the extraordinary second Tour d’Argent sale at Christie’s (the first from the ultra-famous Paris restaurant, in 2009, raised over £1.5m), and I went along to taste over a convivial supper in the boardroom upstairs at Christie's King Street HQ.

The Dutch Cognac collector Bay van der Bunt was there, whose Old Liquors collection is one of the biggest in the world and numbers bottles that travelled with Napoleon’s army, on the back of creaking wagons. He said the North Koreans are enthusiastic customers, a fact which I find rather depressing, given the horror stories that are coming out of that benighted country.

Anyway, back to King Street. I’ve never been to a dinner where Leflaive Puligny Montrachet 09, Palmer 05, Duhart Milon 00, Margaux 88 and the inimitable Pichon Lalande 82, followed by Yquem 04, were hors d’oeuvres to the main event.

Pichon’s long been one of my favourites and the 82 was delectable, knocked the Marguax into a cocked hat (as did all the rest actually – it’s on its last legs, so much more evolved, losing its length). The Palmer was a deep beast, hefty, granitic, slowly emerging. It will be beginning to wake up in 7 years and wondrous for the next 30. The Leflaive was also very young but with a lovely restrained honeyish nose and appley palate with very good acidity. Another stayer. The Yquem was delicious, marmalade and white flowers and that beautiful salty/umami base.

Tour d’Argent’s 3^rd generation owner Andre Terrail was there. Many of the pre-1850 bottles in the sale come from the Café Anglais (his great grandfather married the heiress to the legendary eaterie – I forget her name), and when the Café went in 1913, and the cellars merged with Tour d'Argent, all the bottles (along with the cutlery and decanters and tablecloths) went to Tour d’Argent.

 

Now Terrail and David Ridgway (the veteran head sommelier at the Tour) are clearing out a few odds and sods, such as our 1810, the prized, pre-Revolutionary, Vieux Cognac Grande Champagne Fine ‘Clos de Griffier’ Café Anglais 1788, with an estimate of £3,000-£4,000. Other venerable lots include two jeroboams (2.5L) Grande Fine Champagne Cognac ‘La Tour d’Argent’ 1805, bottled on site more than 200 years ago. Estimates of between £10,000 and £15,000.

I asked Chris Munro, who's running the sale, why they were having it in London instead of Hong Kong, which for the last few years has been de rigueur for this kind of auction. He said it didn't make any difference where you hold it nowadays - they're doing a simulcast in Hong Kong with their man Simon Tam taking bids and passing them over to London. All the biggest lots will probably go to Asian collectors and restaurateurs.

The Christie's ecatalogue

 

 

Marques de Murrieta is rebuilt stone by stone

Evolution is the heart of all great wine: fine winemakers obsessively consider  the progression of their wines from vintage to vintage, from decade to decade, how they change in tune with the public’s perception of how a wine should taste. But fine wine is also about consistency: however much the wine evolves it must be recognisably of its terroir. The only proprietor I have ever met who has so comprehensively made concrete this tension between change and consistency is Vicente Dalmau Cebrian-Sagarriga.

‘You see that building over there?’ The energetic owner of Marques de Murrieta points to a substantial, low dwelling 50 yards away. ‘In two weeks I’m going to pull that down.’ Indeed, he’s knocked down the entire estate and rebuilt it – almost exactly as it was before.

It is an extraordinary undertaking. The Castillo Ygay, the 160-year-old centrepiece, looks from the outside exactly as it did before. But since 2007 the castle - the main massing of the original stone – and its attendant buildings have been razed to the ground and rebuilt. The only part of the original estate that has survived is the 1852 bottle cellar. There are new tasting rooms, a museum, a dining room with a kitchen ‘identical to the one at El Bulli’, Cebrian says, namechecking the now-defunct Best Restaurant in the World, new cellars, a 70,000-bottle library of Murrieta vintages going back to 1852, and a shop with Enomatic machines for tasting.

And that is just the start. The next phase, starting in 2013, will be the rebuilding of the winemaking facilities, with new tanks and new equipment. The quantity of wine produced, delimited by the size of the estate, will not increase. The entire project, both castle and winery, will come in at some €20m.

It’s the kind of audacious and extravagant undertaking you’d expect to find in California. Sandstone blocks, each the size of a small car, are trucked in and hand-hewn by a team of Galician stonemasons who have been working on site for years. When cut to size, the stones are distressed by a mason with a cold-chisel – in order for them to look old. In the vast square-footage of the castle, and the hundreds of metres of pathway surrounding it, every pockmark on every stone has been chipped out by hand. I doubt Charles Foster Kane, dreaming of his Xanadu, would have gone that far. Cebrian says the stone accounted for some 20% of the cost of the project.

Why such an extraordinary undertaking? The old castillo desperately needed renovation – the foundations, they discovered, were less than a foot deep – but they wanted to preserve ‘with faithful accuracy its original shape, identity and architectural centennial beauty,’ as I’m told during one of our many email exchanges. Castillo Ygay was simply too much of an icon to change in even the smallest degree.

So it is new, but it is old. As such it’s the perfect metaphor for what Cebrian and his technical director Maria Vargas are trying to do at Murrieta. Indeed, it’s a handy metaphor for the process of change that is going on in the whole of Rioja, with bodegas teetering on that fine line between modernity and tradition.

Discussing the project, from the bricks-and-mortar rebuilding to the development of the wines, Cebrian’s conversation is littered with the language of evolution and preservation; the oxymoronic words ‘change’ and ‘maintain’ are used over and over again. ‘You can’t stop,’ he says. ‘You need always to be in evolution.’ And on the other hand, ‘Over 12 years I have been slowly defining the style of Murrieta while always trying to maintain the identity. It’s like the winery: we are balancing tradition and identity, youth and modernity.’

The Ygay estate, which Luciano, Marques de Murrieta founded in the mid-19^th century (1852 was the date of the first official shipping of the wines), is the biggest single estate in Rioja. Its 300ha are wholly-owned – unusually for the region, where it is far more common for even the oldest estates to own few hectares but to buy in grapes from dozens of growers. The vineyards, composed of old alluvial soils, clay and limestone, with a warm surface of hefty river stones, give excellent drainage and are meticulously husbanded.

‘Everything starts in the vineyard,’ Cebrian says. Vine stress is controlled by ultra-modern infrared leaf imaging techniques by which water conductivity in the leaf is measured and vines irrigated accordingly. Parcels are separately vinified, and the team – led by Vargas – are constantly adjusting maceration times and the oak regime in search of the perfect balance of colour and fruit.

The flagship wine, the Gran Reserva Castillo Ygay – a Tempranillo/Mazuelo blend which Greg Sherwood MW of importer Handford Wines calls ‘One of the three most famous labels anywhere in the world’ – is undergoing a transformation as radical, and perhaps as invisible, as the castle itself.

‘We don’t want to lose the identity American oak gives the wine,’ Cebrian says, ‘but we want to offer  more fruit and a better balance between oak and fruit.’

From the 2000 vintage the oak regime (on both Ygay and Marques de Murrieta, the entry-level offering) has been overhauled. Whereas Ygay used to spend 50-60 months in 5-7-year-old barrels, Cebrian and Vargas have shortened and intensified the process. Now it spends 30 months in oak, the first year of which is new. ‘This is the first time Ygay has touched new oak at the beginning of its life.’

Fermentation and maceration is now far more controlled, Cebrian says, at lower temperatures, ‘for less extraction but more fruit’.

The aim, he says, is to turn back the clock: to return Murrieta to the glory days. ‘What we’re trying to achieve is to move into the era of Marques de Murrieta wines of 40 years ago – wines of elegance, femininity and power, with nice balance and a lot of colour.’

There are of course two Ygays: one that is bottled after 30 months and aged for three years in bottle; and the historic vintages, which are left in barrel for decades. The 1978 is in the market now (it sells for less than £100 a bottle, amazingly), and the next release will be the 1980, followed possibly by the 1982 and the 87.

‘We want to show the market how Ygay can age in oak and bottle,’ Cebrian says.

In the €15 Marques de Murrieta, there is also this adjustment, a throttling back of extraction here, a slight lowering of the fermentation temperature there.

‘In 2008 we are turning into something more delicate and feminine. It’s exactly the same basis but we’re moving into something more exclusive. Between 2007 and 2008 you can see another touch’ – but as always he stresses the delicacy of the adjustment – ‘there is no parabola.’

Vicente Dalmau Cebrian-Sagarriga y Suarez-Llanos, Conde de Creixell, inherited one of the most venerable bodegas in Spain in 1996 at the age of 24, on the sudden death of his father, who was only 47. There was, he said, ‘a great emptiness’ in those months. He clarifies: ‘An emptiness in the sense of image. Who was the boss? What was going to happen to the winery?’

So he went to Ygay and ‘spent three years just looking. What was the new project? I knew I had to maintain the identity of the estate but at the same time add youth and modernity.’

It’s a powerful picture. A young man, a playboy (as he says he still is – ‘girlfriends, girlfriends, girlfriends’), literally at the centre of the great estate, trying to make sense of his sudden inheritance, keen to make a mark yet sensible of the weight of history and the responsibility that has landed on his shoulders.

I also get an idea that the Cebrian family – outsiders from Galicia (where the stonemasons come from) – took a while to adjust to Rioja. Cebrian’s father had bought the noble but run-down bodega in 1983 on the proceeds of the sale of TV company Antena 3, ‘but the Riojanas wouldn’t accept him. He was resented.’

The young heir had even more of a reason to stamp his authority on Murrieta: he was doing it for his father as well.

The result of his three-year contemplation of the estate was the hiring of ‘a new, young team’, with Vargas being appointed winemaker in 2000. ‘This was a new project inside the old. We began a different dialogue with the estate.’

As far as the wines were concerned, there was indeed a ‘new project within the old’. Cebrian’s father had died just as the drive to ‘modernity’ was kicking off. In Bordeaux this meant the Vins de Garage of the right bank; in Rioja a similar style – micro-cuvée, nano-yield, high extraction, fruit-layered wines – became known by the wonderfully pretentious moniker of Vinos de Autor.

‘I hate that – the concentration, the high-fruit nose, the high alcohol. But one of the first projects that Maria and I did was to make another red wine next to this new concept of Rioja. It would represent a very small percentage of our output, only 20,000 bottles, but it would be a chance for Marques de Murrieta to show this is what we feel is a modern wine.’

It would, Cebrian said, ‘send a message to the market that the son had taken over.’ Dalmau, Murrieta’s very own ‘Vino de Autor’,  led the charge. This is how Cebrian would ‘show the market how Marques de Murrieta understands the new era of winemaking in Rioja.’

He and Vargas were consciously breaking free of history. ‘With this wine we had no roots. We thought, “Let’s do something different”.’

They added Cabernet Sauvignon (the estate’s tiny Cabernet crop now goes entirely into Dalmau) to the 90%-plus Tempranillo, put it through malolactic fermentation in barrel (‘for a creamier feel’), and aged it for 20 months in 225-litre new French oak barrels.

The Tempranillo comes from the prized Canajas plot, 500m above sea level, where the vines are 50 years old – and they ramp up the concentration by green-harvesting an average of 50% of the fruit.

The resulting €80 wine is a dark, almost inky glassful, redolent of pencil shavings, eucalyptus, dark black cherry and blackberry, with tremendous potency, silky tannins and wonderful length. It is a delicious wine, made by a winemaker at the top of her game, with the best raw material and the most expensive technology available.

But, to paraphrase the French general, ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas Rioja.’ In Cebrian’s own phrase, it is a ‘concept wine’, and for all its sleekness it is about as Spanish as the glass elevators that swoosh up and down the outside of the Reina Sofia art gallery in Madrid.

I don’t share these thoughts during the tasting as we have already discussed modernity and internationalism in some detail. While we were looking at the Marques de Murrieta I had suggested the 2008 had a more ‘international’ feel than its predecessors. What did I mean, Cebrian asked. It was more to do with the quality of the tannins and the liftedness of the palate, I thought, but it was subtle. What I called international could be described as feminine – that is, more in tune with a worldwide movement towards lighter and more delicate wines. He was mollified. ‘I thought for a moment you were saying we had lost our Rioja character.’

Not a bit of it – the Marques de Murrieta is a wonderful, terroir-driven wine. But I simply can’t say the same for Dalmau, which I think is one of those toned, somewhat airbrushed beauties one finds from high-end wineries all over the world: wines designed to wow a tableful of Korean businessmen as effortlessly as a dinner party in Oslo.

There are many who disagree. Greg Sherwood reckons ‘they don’t lose their roots. You can definitely taste Spain – there’s that hint of classicism’ and veteran Spanish expert John Radford agrees. ‘Unmistakeably Rioja, and a fascinating combination of traditional and modern.’

Sherwood concedes however it isn’t in the same league as its sister wines, whose ‘huge recognition’ and reputation mean they fly off the shelves. ‘It’s a modern style and it’s just finding its feet. It never really got the traction the other wines have.’

After our morning of tasting at Murrieta, Cebrian, Vargas and I head off for a late lunch in Logroño. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ he says, pulling a Castillo Ygay 1959 out of his bag.

It was bottled in 1989 after 30 years in barrel, with no racking,  just topping up, and it is sublime. Sprightly, bright and clean, with an extraordinary flavour of sweet quince, prunes and pot pourri, and sweet refreshing tannins.

We taste it alongside the 2004 Ygay. ‘You can see the family resemblance. They have the same structure. They are brothers,’ Vargas says.

This, I think, is unmistakeably Rioja. The 2004 is a superb mouthful of black cherry, black pepper and silky tannins, but it is a mere child beside the aristocratic 1959. How do they see it evolving?

‘It’s going to be great,’ Cebrian says. Then he adds, swirling the 59 in his glass, ‘But with this in mind, it is quite a responsibility.’

Marques de Murrieta wines:

Pazo Barrantes Albariño, Rias Baixas, Galicia

100% Albariño produced at the Cebrian-Sagarriga family estate Pazo Barrantes in Galicia, vinified in stainless steel

La Comtessa Albariño, Pazo Barrantes, Rias Baixas, Galicia

Newly-released high-end Albariño from Pazo Barrantes. Single vineyard, aged 18 months in French oak and 12 months in bottle. 3800 bottles produced in 2009

Marques de Murrieta Capellania Viura, Rioja

100% Viura from parcels grown at 300m on the Ygay estate, aged 15 months in new French oak

Marques de Murrieta Reserva, Rioja

Tempranillo, Garnacha Tinta, Mazuelo, Graciano, all from the Ygay estate. Aged 20-22 months in American oak of which at least 8 months in new barrels. One year in bottle before release

Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Especial, Rioja

Tempranillo and Mazuelo from the finest Ygay plots. Only produced in the best vintages. Up to 30 months years in American oak, of which at least 10 months in new barrels, and 3 years ageing in bottle.

In the very best years the wine is left in barrel of decades: the 1978 was bottled in 1998 and released in 2007. The next releases will be the 1980, followed possibly by the 1982 and the 87.  Since 2000, the Gran Reserva Especial has come exclusively from the La Plana vineyard on the estate

Dalmau

The ‘statement’ cuvée, a blend of Tempranillo with less than 10% Cabernet Sauvignon and Graciano, all from the estate. Aged for up to 20 months in new French oak. The first vintage was 1994.

This article was first published in Decanter magazine

English dry whites are like French rock 'n' roll...

[This article first appeared in Food and Travel magazine]

[Note that the next English wine tasting is May 3rd - I'll update after it]
‘Ah, English wine, it tastes of rain,’ was a frequently-heard jibe up to a few years ago. Not any more. Now it is commonplace for English sparkling wines to win serious international prizes. The Ridge View Grosvenor Blanc de Blancs for example, won the top gong at the Decanter World Wine Awards two years ago, seeing off  the likes of Taittinger, Charles Heidsieck, and Thienot.

 English still wines are another story. Southern England, with its chalk and limestone soils and warm maritime climate, is perfect for developing the racy, nervy acids and keen fruit flavours that are so prized in fine dry sparkling wine, but up to now we’ve struggled to coax enough flavour to make anything but rather flabby, thin white wines – tasting, indeed, of rain. 

How things have changed. At the last big English wine tasting, on a beautiful spring day in London last year, the hall was buzzing like a row of Kentish beehives. As I went round the tables I became convinced that English still wines are now more than a curiosity.

Tthe finest English whites are delicious, refreshing, delicately floral, with scents redolent of the hedgerows: cow-parsley, forget-me-not, sweet hawthorn, cowslip, thistle, elder and dog rose. Many producers have found that sought-after combination of low alcohol with taste. Most of the wines clock in at less than 12% alcohol yet still have body, fruit, acidity, and length.

The best grapes for still whites are Bacchus and Ortega. Both are aromatic and floral – Ortega is a distant relation of Gewurztraminer and has some of that variety’s viscosity and perfumed oomph, but in a very understated, English way. If I was planting a vineyard tomorrow, for still wines, I’d back these two. 

At this stage I can only recommend the white wines. Enthusiasts will tell you there are very fine rosés and reds around, but I haven’t seen one that I would serve my guests as enthusiastically as the whites. Rosés can be underwhelming and damp, while reds can be rather thin and metallic. Global warming aside, average temperatures and sunshine hours in England just aren’t enough to ripen red grapes. 

While English whites are more than a curiosity, I fear it will be decades before they represent more than a cottage industry. They’re never going to be able to compete on price, for a start. However accomplished the winemaking and however delicious the wine, there is always going to be a Sauvignon Blanc de Touraine several pounds cheaper. It’s like French rock ‘n’ roll: it can be charming, but it’s always going to be the poor cousin because someone, somewhere, is producing something louder and with less effort. 

That analogy might be worth exploring further: ‘louder’ being the key word. We tasted the wines below on the hottest day of the year so far, sitting in March sunshine in a garden in Kent. They went perfectly with the benign warmth of the sun, with the feeling of spring growth all around, the delicate nettle flavours, hints of damp earth and greenness seemed quite in harmony. I can’t help feeling that riper, more fruit-forward wines might have overwhelmed. 

So there’s a time and a place for English wines. Don’t baulk at the price: over thirteen quid for a still English wine that isn’t quite as fresh or quite as fruity or floral as its Kiwii counterpart at £6.49 is pushing it a bit. But £9 for a wine that is so freighted with English terroir you could close your eyes and be in a country garden on the South Downs? I bet you spend more than that on orange juice every week.

1.    Three Choirs Annum 2011
Incredibly – almost  off-puttingly – light in colour, an attractive nose of grapefruit and summer fruits, and a bit of spice. The palate has more summer fruits, elderflower and a good mouthfilling weight and nice fresh acidity that belies the colour.
Waitrose

 2.    Biddenden Ortega 2011

From the vineyards of Kent, surrounded by pear and apple orchards, this has a sweet dense gooseberry nose and good weight, with perfumed crunchy apple flavours. Ortega is related to Gewurztraminer, and this has something of the grape’s florality and unction.
Best English Wine, Biddenden Vineyards, English Wine Centre, Harvey Nichols, Secret Cellar, Slurp

 3.    Chapel Down Bacchus 2011

Very pale colour, but a good healthy nose with hint of pear drops. The acidity is lovely on this wine, fresh and sweet, with notes of melon and pineapple and some nettley flavours. Light and refreshing – a wine for late morning in summer.
Majestic

 4.    Camel Valley Darnibole Bacchus 2011

One of the best Bacchus around, from a multi-award-winning English vineyard. Flavours of gooseberry, crisp apple, and some elderflower, set off by clean, nervy acidity a crisp, food-friendly finish. Great with seafood.
Berry Bros £15.95

 5.    Kenton Vineyard Bacchus 2010

Powerful Sauvignon flavours (but in a good way – not sweaty or tinny asparagus but delicate gooseberry and cut apple). The nettle palate almost stings the tongue. Long and sweetly aromatic, bursting with English flavour. Very good, and an excellent price
Kenton Vineyard £7.95

6.    Three Choirs Madelaine Angevine 2010
Lovely floral, nettley character with aromatic spice, great acid balance and good length. Delicious, very light but with massive charm and character. Another one for a summer morning.
£13

Three Choirs Vineyards