Ah, the Basque. Everyone loves it, the tapas and the bone-dry wine. Give me a squid sandwich and three glasses of txakoli any day; whisk me off to the Bay of Txingudi in a softly laundered linen suit.
I shall walk slowly and remark about the beauty of it all — those green headlands, that ocean very blue. Pressingly, you can’t move for gildas in London any more. They’re like the fancy man’s Pret jambon beurre, which quite recently disappeared and rendered the coffee chain redundant. I dare say Pret will do its own version of the gilda soon enough in a bid to stay relevant (impossible) and then the tapa will recede into relative British obscurity again and we’ll all start obsessing over something else. What might that be? The Romeo and Juliet? It’s a landmark £3 morsel at Bar Flor, a new place at the much-enjoyed Wildflowers restaurant in Belgravia.
Wasn’t sure either — I don’t think the name ever denoted a delicate hunk of cheese smothered in quince paste before. These best precede Cantabrian anchovies, manchego with truffle honey and tuna belly with beans and spiky red onions. Heaven, no? We all love the Basque. More so when we drink wine bouncing triumphantly with salinity and explore those farmyard ciders so funky they may as well be wearing woollen berets.
No doubt people will commend the august selection of vermouths, trailing jollily through spritzes as if walking the Camino del Norte and reciting Redondo. For me, a cider called Isastegi Sidra Natural, full of green apples, fresh hay and old earth. It’s £8 a glass but that’s the price we pay for culture I suppose.
House wines are £7, not bad at all. When the Basque region was planted for the first time in London, with all the raucous fanfare that decides a trend, it was like a tree shaking so that the ground might be carpeted in Perelló olives. We tread them now, and the aroma is good.
The Old Fashioned Edit at The Ned
Woodford Reserve has partnered with the Ned for a whiskey-soaked takeover. The Kentucky bourbon giant has taken over the club’s Library bar, now open to the public for the first time. The Ned’s head of bars George Simmons has whipped up four Woodford cocktails, each a riff on an old fashioned, which chart 200 years of changing tastes. The Empresses of Seventh Avenue (Woodford Reserve, corn, smoke, demerara, aromatic bitters) sounds like it deserves its own cult following.
Out November 6; Pavilion, £22
Journalist Victoria Brzezinski and sommelier Bert Blaize have co-written a new book on wine that traverses vineyards, kitchens and communities to “define what we drink”. With stories from the daughters reclaiming land in post-Soviet Georgia to the rock stars who fancy themselves as new-age viticulturists, the book is part-travel diary, part-insider’s guide to wine.