PREVIEW §
Well-researched and down to earth: A free-spirited, free-form buffet
Who’s Afraid of Romanée-Conti? A Shortcut to Drinking Great Wines Dan Keeling
Published by Quadrille; 285 pages; $45 / £30 Reviewed by Brian St Pierre
I
f you had enjoyed an especially lucrative Christmas—landing a bonus, dividend, or something beneficial from a well-heeled ancestor—and were walking down Lamb’s Conduit Street in London soon afterward, you might have been tempted, even seduced, by a chalkboard list in the window of a restaurant: a by-the-125ml-glass wine list, in fact, but as far from the usual come-hither beckoning as most of us are from Outer Mongolia. (Gravner’s austerely sturdy Ribolla Gialla 2010 at £32, Pichon Baron 1989 at £86, and Yquem 1989 at £135 were among the 15 extraordinary wines that caught my eye but not my deflated wallet.) The restaurant is called Noble Rot, part of a small empire of wine-oriented restaurants and other ventures. The attitude of its founders is especially notable in their off-piste and upbeat magazine of the same name, a mildly but firmly disruptive periodical—rumpled, informal, and casually cheeky, going its own way in its own moderately mannerly and knowing style, where offhand reports may include how actress Keira Knightley enlivens filming with wine tasting, or that sportscaster Gary Lineker is good company to hang out with over an expansive and quite liquid lunch, or if England’s best restaurant writer Marina O’Loughlin is still on form. (She is.) The sprawling manse of wine may have many chambers, but Noble Rot’s particular suite of exuberant neon-lit playrooms is as cheerfully busy as the sommeliers’ station at an oligarch’s birthday party. Now, however, comes another surprise, reflected obliquely in its
48 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 87 | 2025
title—this book is a serious compilation of ruminative essays and interviews (though of course never somber, and not in the least schematic), interspersed with recommendations offered as concise “shortcuts to drinking great wine.” It’s an assemblage of idiosyncratic, well-researched, down-to-earth, and on-the-spot dispatches from the front lines of change (at least in Europe, it should be noted) by Noble Rot co-founder Dan Keeling. There are a half-dozen utilitarian chapters dutifully providing advice on how to at least begin a search for some of the large flock of rare birds he adores with online tools and reliable merchants and importers, and what to do to enhance them if and when you capture them, such as aging, serving, and even—in a casual sort of way—talking about them, but he’s mainly determined to shake up a lot of fundamentals, cheerfully disassembling received wisdom, razzing established hierarchies, and unabashedly in love with, as he writes, “the mysterious puzzle of vino,” as he cheers the idea that “the absence of certainty is part of the deal” with truly fine wine. Whether or not you embrace that thought, the considerable array of “shortcut” recommendations that follow most chapters (definitely not rankings) provides useful insights and markers for many of the regions, pointing at the newer ways (as in “greatness comes from unexpected places” that avoid “the negative appellation trap”) vignerons are reinventing styles (“Chianti not Chianti,” unfortified Sherry from “the yeastie boys” of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, or dry
“new-school classics” made without much intervention and “full of life” from Chenin Blanc in the Loire Valley).
Heart-on-sleeve certitude Throughout, change is certainly on the itinerary—a ripe target in much of Europe, where a long and involved wine history provides much for the author and an expanding cohort of younger wine producers to argue with. This they appear happy to do, aiming to seed a new consensus by questioning established assumptions and chucking some cherished ones overboard— especially those assumptions born of generational differences and international consultants mired in the trenches of “typicity.” It’s an attitude advanced with heart-on-sleeve certitude: “Where you grow grapes still matters. But AOCs, PDOs, or any other bureaucratic POVs don’t create wines worth falling in love with: dreamers do,” Keeling declares and sets out to prove—mostly succeeding. It’s sometimes a wild ride, with numerous sharp turns, an abundance of puns in the road, and little room to argue with the articulate but talkative driver. The
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