514: All the Natural Wine That’s Fit To Print with Dan Keeling of Noble Rot

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0:31One of the things about Noble Rot is, yeah, we want to talk about wine and food in a really informed and depth way, but we also want it to have a sense of humor and it to represent a fun escape.

0:46This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:54I am not here.

1:23go about finding a great glass at the bar.

1:35Dan Keeling, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So it's the end of your work day. Are you going to be opening a bottle of wine in your near future? Well, it's one of those rare days where I don't. I've got a I've got a busy schedule this week, so it's good to have a couple of days clear of wine, or so the doctor says. So, yeah, not tonight. Yeah, I feel like for folks who are in the beverage space in general, but certainly wine, it must be interesting to kind of navigate that. Do you find that a lot of people you know have certain days that they observe where they don't drink wine or some kind of way of trying to mediate their habits or not really?

2:15well i think i think this generation does whereas i think maybe past generations didn't do so much um i remember speaking to steven spurrier who was a real kind of um one of the inspirations for us in fact in in wine industry and he was uh you know quite an upper class guy and uh i said to him you know how much do you drink a day honestly and he said for the last 50 years he hadn't drunk less than a liter of wine a day and he didn't have any days off at all. So that's some stamina. But I don't know. I think working in wine and restaurants, then if you can do a couple of days off, then I think it's good for your brain, definitely.

2:58Yeah, I guess that's one way to keep from getting a hangover is to just keep drinking every day. Oh, exactly. Yeah. So you mentioned you have a busy week. I imagine that might be because your book is about to come out. And I was wondering if you could tell me like, what's behind the title, Who's Afraid of Romani Conti, a shortcut to drinking great wine. So why Romani Conti? Why is that what you call the pinnacle of what wine can achieve? Well, yeah, I mean, I could have called it Who's Afraid of Fine Wine, but I didn't think it had that much of a good ring to it. So, you know, Romani Conti for me represents, you know, the pinnacle of wine.

3:38It's the most fabled wine in the world um and so actually the actual words as well romaniconti they roll very nicely um i'm a big burgundy fan it's kind of the the top domain in um burgundy is domain de la romaniconti so that became the title and by kind of i don't know what it was something in the universe uh happened but you know there's that book the secret um came out like probably around the millennium you know the power of wishful thinking once I came up with the title I found that I got invited to this amazing tasting at the Domain just through kind of mutual contacts and it was 25 vintages of Romani Conti which was just an incredible thing to be able to go and drink and taste I never thought I would get access to it in that way you know I tasted it before but maybe a thimble's worth at a tasting but to actually drink a wine it kind of brings it alive so much more, you get so much more experience from doing that.

4:39So a couple of years ago, I went to this tasting, which kind of makes up one of the chapters in the book. The book kind of ranges from starting off as completely ignorant about wine and then finding out about it through, you know, that kind of cliche of a gateway wine and then ending up at this crazy tasting of Romani Conti and then trying to work out where everything else that I tasted over the kind of 15 years in between kind of fitted in. So it's got lots of kind of niche and interesting wines from around Europe. Yeah, it's a really special book. I found myself being really drawn to just your writing and the description of a lot of the wine.

5:20But I love what you just said about this tasting that you got to go to. And I'm curious, as a wine writer and editor, when you get to experience like 25 different vintages of an amazing wine, do you have a notebook that you're keeping notes in? or do you kind of try to jot it down afterwards? Like how do you kind of navigate so much input? Yeah, I was trying to jot it down, the experience at the time, but it was one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of my life. It was like when I first drove a car on my own. I had to drive a car from Fulham in London to one of my relatives' house in Kilburn, one of my first days in work at A &M Records, and it was at rush hour.

5:58and you know i can nearly crash so many times and a 20 minute journey turned into three hours and likewise this was a another experience where because i kind of knew that it was a once in a lifetime experience that i that i had to really kind of focus and also there's that thing of imposter syndrome this is supposed to be the world's most fabled and incredible wine and can can I do it justice as a taster? And it started off at nine o 'clock in the morning in the Prince de Conti's old couvery in von Romany in Burgundy. And there was eight of us in total, three people from the domain. And it was the most nerve-wracking kind of first 40 minutes when there were seven Romany Contis in front of me.

6:46And because the way it's made, it's made with stems included, so it's not de-stemmed, so it's quite an undergrowth-y flavour to it, or aroma rather. It didn't have the kind of usual kind of fruit characteristics that you would spot in young Pinot Noir. So it took a while to really acclimatise to the wine. I love this idea of being nervous. And also starting at 9am, is that a typical hour to be drinking so much wine? Well, you're not drinking at that time. You're spitting. So, you know, by the end of the tasting, it was four o 'clock in the afternoon. And there was a lot of wine left on the table.

7:32And at that point, you know, you're thinking, can you really leave that kind of wine in a glass undrunk? So some of it got hoovered up at that point. That's very reasonable. I want to talk to you about the collection of book quotes that you have, because you have like Keira Knightley and Mike D of the Beastie Boys. talking about how this is the best wine book. How did that come about? So Mike was in issue one of Noble Rock magazine. And one of my friends who was a music agent knew his manager. And I got in touch with him through that. And he came on board and did a Q &A back in 2013. And then he came to the UK and I interviewed him and we became friends.

8:14And so I see Mike a lot. He's a big wine lover. You know, I grew up listening to the Beastie Boys, you know, There's a 17-year-old kid in Buckinghamshire in England. You know, Check Your Head was one of my favourite ever albums. So quite surreal to become friends with Mike, but he's a very down-to-earth guy, as is Kira. And Kira, how did we meet Kira? I met Kira through Friends again. And James, her husband, was in a band called The Klaxons. And I tried to sign them to Ireland Records back in 2006 or 2007, unsuccessfully, but we knew each other. And I saw him a few years later through another interviewee in the magazine, which was James Murphy from LCD Sound System.

9:00I love all of these connections to wine and art and music. And you mentioned a little bit about how you have a past as a record label A &R guy. I'm curious if you think there's any skills or POV from that that you think have transferred over well to your current stint in the hospitality why in media world yeah well coming up through a &r you know one thing it does teach you is tenacity and i remember you know my first ever boss at a &m records describing what needs to happen um you know in the job and he said you know you need to know about every band in britain and uh as soon as you hear about a band find out the number of the manager call him up ask him for the cassette it was cassettes at that point in 97 i guess and uh two days later if it hasn't arrived call him again and then two days later if hasn't arrived call him and call him until they say either leave me alone or you get the demo and that kind of tenacity is something that you know i've applied to certain parts of the job with the magazine because you know a magazine is something that you have to feels like you have to hustle together every issue um you know you have to They provide a lot of contributors, come up with ideas.

10:13You know, there's the artwork. Also with our wine import business, that kind of A &R attitude of getting out and trying to find who the next hot winemaker is going to be. And also the existing ones that you really love and seeing if you can work with them in some way, that comes from A &R. In terms of the kind of hospitality side of the business, I remember in 2006, this company called Terra Firma took over EMI. They were like a private hedge fund company. And they had a history of what they called saving companies. Odeon Cinemas, whose employees they said thought they were in the film business, when in fact they were in the popcorn business.

10:56And I say to our staff, yeah, we're definitely in the wine, food and hospitality business. But what really sets us apart is we're in the storytelling business. And that's whether they're talking to their colleagues in briefings before every service and interactions with customers. You know, the real reason for Noble Right is to provide value for our customers and our readers because, you know, we care about the people that are coming in and wanting to have a good time with us. And we believe that there's some real value in the information and the stories that we're sharing about these incredible winemakers and foods and dishes.

11:32so that's another side of it that definitely comes from my music background yeah I love all of those threads connecting and I think especially what you're saying about storytelling in the restaurants and the wine bars that really does kind of I imagine come from the fact that you've had this magazine noble rot for so long has it been 10 years now over 10 years yeah and it's incredibly um competitive restaurants and um you know it's such a great thing to have this uh you know every issue 23 stories uh all these different contributors who really care about food and wine and popular culture you know in the new issue we've got ridley scott who came in did an amazing uh amazingly interesting interview uh and we we typically do it over a couple of bottles of wine and it's quite relaxed so you can get maybe to places that they don't normally go interviewees you know when it's a bit too kind of formal I actually have been really excited to talk to you because in addition to taste I run a indie literary food magazine it's a dessert-based magazine and we often fantasize about opening like a dessert wine bar that's connected to the magazine in some ways.

12:48So I think that the fact that you do that is so cool. And I'm just interested in what inspired that idea. I'm sure it's fun over a glass of wine to say we should open a restaurant or several restaurants, but when did you decide that it was actually time to do that? Well, it became apparent quite quickly that to do an independent magazine or fanzine was just not going to earn us any money. There was two of us, you know, we had families, mortgages, is, you know, cats, pets, you've got to earn some money and magazines are not a way to do it. Nor are restaurants particularly, but we thought it was a good idea at the time and we were passionate about restaurants, obviously.

13:27So, you know, we thought about do we open a shop, do we do the restaurant? We have got a couple of shops now, but restaurants are very exciting. You know, there's a lot of instant kind of feedback from customers when you recommend a wine, for example. They can tell you straight away whether they like it or not. You know, it's just such a special place, a restaurant. You know, you could be in there on a busy service and, you know, sometimes you just get this moment of clarity when, you know, everything goes quiet save for a few people laughing and you realise that people are escaping from their everyday life and just kind of having those special moments.

14:03And when, you know, people say that they come and they have anniversaries or birthdays at Noble Rot or, you know, it's where they propose to their husband or wife, It's just creating this magical kind of community of people that, you know, if they keep coming, it's just such a kind of satisfying thing. Yeah, I imagine also, you know, making magazines is a really social process. And then you put it out into the world and you don't really get to see people reading it in the same way that you get to watch people drinking a glass of wine. That kind of immediate feedback. Yeah, you don't. You see them on Instagram.

14:38I mean, I always picture the magazine sitting by people's toilets, and that's kind of where I always really wanted it to be. And I want it to be that thing that people see in their house somewhere, and it reminds them of being in the restaurant. And, you know, one of the things about Noble Rot is, yeah, we want to talk about wine and food in a really informed, in-depth way, but we also want it to have a sense of humour and it to represent a fun escape. So like you're sitting in the restaurant with your friends having that fun escape from the world, you can kind of pick up an issue and dive into it and be whisked away to these other places.

15:15And, you know, everything from the artwork to, you know, how it's quite kind of poppy and playful to the kind of people that write for the magazine and they all have a sense of humour. It's really important, the overall feel of Noble Rot. Something I really enjoyed when reading the book is how you were able to talk about noble rot the restaurant group as like a way that you put your perspective on wine into practice um like for example you were talking about how there are certain rules for a house wine that you would put on the menu at noble rot so what makes something a good house wine for the restaurant group well all our wines they've got to taste like what they are um you know be something that we'll happily drink ourselves with friends and if it's a house wine it's got to cost as little as possible so that's a that's a big challenge uh quite easy to find old vintages of mouton rothschild um for a fairly decent price but it's the cheap wines which is a holy grail but you know when i say it tastes like what it is that probably sounds a bit simplistic but if it's a vina verde it should taste like a vina verde and if it's a chablis it should have those kind of classic hallmarks of a chablis so that's important to us you know we're into characterful distinctive wines we're not into homogenized wines so uh that's mega important for us obviously you've got to have something that's not prone to a lot of faults um which you know sometimes with wines there are wines that are typically a bit more faulty some from some producers and that wouldn't do for a uh for a house wine you know if it's a white wine it's got to be crisp clean refreshing got to have good texture and persistence um and if it's a house red it's got to be you know have supple tannins it can't be too drying it's got to have pure fruit nothing too challenging nothing too alcoholic too sweet it's this kind of middle ground you've got to please a lot of people with the house wine um they're not easy to find yeah it's a goldilocks moment, I would imagine, when you find a good one.

17:23Do you try to keep things on the menu for a while or is it kind of more in your favour to be rotating in and introducing people to new things? I mean, our lists change all the time. So from one day to the next, you'll come in and there'll be different wines on there. The house wines will typically stay, you know, we'll keep them for months, years. There's no reason to change them as long as we've got a good supplier that is hitting all those kind of um you know the price point and the quality levels then then consistency is good but you know we preyed ourselves on you know finding you know the interesting new producers in lots of different areas um the most amount of wine on our list comes from france but then we've got a lot of italian wines we've got a lot of spanish a lot of greek wine's a big thing with us my business partner is a master wine who did his thesis in santorini ascertico who so he's a big grecophile um you know it's a diverse list we have got new world wines on there californian wines australian wines as well but we kind of specialize a bit more in the old world for want of a better term and we go deep on old vintages as well so you know for example bordeaux is now so out of fashion that you can actually pick up some really great value with a lot of bottle age for not that much money.

18:41So we sell a lot of that in our Mayfair restaurant and maybe in Soho it's a bit more kind of durer and there's more natural wine gets sold. So it's interesting the different areas of London that we're in. Yeah, I think that's such an interesting part of it as well. Do you order for all of them and then kind of decide which one needs more of one kind of wine? yeah we yeah we kind of there's different nuances on each list like you know mayfair is there's people who come to our mayfair restaurant who don't leave mayfair unless they're going to the south of france for their yacht so it's a slightly slightly different demographic to our land conduit street restaurant so it is a bit more nuanced in different ways in the different restaurants but overall you could go and you can drink from this kind of key areas that that noble rock love and who we write, where we've written about in the magazine and in the previous book as well.

19:39In your book, you talk about the importance of pairing food and wine through a really great example, which is vin jaune and comte cheese. I'm going to read this if you don't mind, because I think it's really beautiful writing. Paired with judiciously aged local comte, vin jaune is arguably half of the most delicious symbiotic combination known to man. that such a confluence between grape, yeast, dairy, and our capacity for ecstasy exists is almost an argument for intelligent design. Perhaps there is really something out there that loves us and wants us to be happy. Or maybe we just lucked out.

20:12So how did you come across this example and how do you approach pairing in the Noble Raw at restaurants? In the restaurants, you know, of our set lunch, we'll always have wines paired to it. And I think that there's some pretty basic rules that you can stick to so things don't clash too much. You know, you think about the texture of a dish or whether it has a sauce, those kind of things. Of course, whether it's fish, meat or vegetables. With food and wine matching, I think it can get taken a bit too far because I think there's some completely magical matches. And one of those is Vanjone with Comte cheese or Vanjone with Vacheron cheese as well, which are both from the area.

20:53But they're few and far between. But when you do have those kind of synergies between food and wine, I think that they can just elevate both to another level. So, for example, we were in Puglia this summer and we went to this incredible restaurant and we had sea urchin linguine with a Pinot Meunier champagne. And the kind of champagne, it mirrored the smell, the aroma of the sea urchin and vice versa. It was just an incredible match. likewise truffle with aged barolo or grouse with an old burgundy they can have incredible synergy between the kind of smells they overlap they kind of egg each other on in some weird way so i think there's these magical matches and then there's just these kind of general kind of you know chardonnay with you know roast chicken or whatever which are all fine but i don't know if they're kind of improving each other that much.

21:53Yeah. And with this Van Joen Compete example, what about those two flavor profiles are interacting well together? Yeah. So Van Joen is a little bit like an unfortified sherry. It's not the same grape, but it has that kind of smell, that kind of flavor profile. It has an incredibly large array of different flavors that come out of a Van Joen barrel. It could be, you know, these kind of spicy curry leaves i've had like old van jones from the 60s that taste of ripe indian mangoes that have been salted or you know fenugreek is another flavor profile but it's it's kind of it's indescribable it's very savory um the wine has been aged under a floor of yeast for six and a half years a minimum of six and a half years in a barrel so when a wine gets put in a barrel normally for that length of time it evaporates down and it will um you know it will get ruined it'll get turned to vinegar because the oxygen will will do that but the the yeast protects it and it gives it this crazy array of different flavors very umami as well um you know curry leaf go back to that i just you know first time i ever had it it really made me laugh because i never thought a wine would taste like that and when you put it with something that's as umami as a bit of aged Comte.

23:16It's just a brilliant kind of synergy. There's that old cliche of what grows together goes together. And maybe it's because they're made in the same region, the same microbes or something. Maybe that's the kind of secret of it. Yeah, I think that was definitely my takeaway from reading that section that, obviously, we talk about Tawar a lot with wine, but that cheese or other kind of foods from a region would have something similar going on there, maybe even on like a microbial deeper level um yeah yeah absolutely i'm curious for you what it was like to be writing a book after publishing a magazine for so long was it exciting to be in a different format and did you have a different approach when you're going about writing the book no not really uh i don't necessarily always focus on outcomes of things as i'm doing something you know i'll just do a little bit and often and with the magazine it's and with writing i just find that I try and do a little bit every day.

24:16I think that's how you become better at writing or how you become better at cooking or anything in life is just by constantly doing it. So I'm not always thinking, I've got a magazine to put out in three months time or a book to deliver. It's just get a bit done. And I love the process, kind of always a little bit disappointed when it's finished and it's trying to work out what to do next. I love to hear that from a writer that enjoys the process. I think sometimes people are not actually as in love with the act of writing itself? No, I mean, I understand it when people say they hate writing because what they mean is they just can't get the words out that they want.

24:51But I also, I've listened to people explain what their book is about and then not really sounding like they had a good time writing it. And that puts me right off. Yeah. Do you listen to music when you're writing? Not particularly, but sometimes if I'm in the mood, then put something, you know, quite strong or a motive on. just to get going um but no i kind of like i don't know if i like silence i used to be a bit more particular and needed silence but i can write pretty much anywhere now i can write on the tube can uh you know obviously it doesn't need to be packed on the tube but just if you can grab 20 minutes here and there it's it's that old thing of you know your first draft of anything is normally pretty crap so you're just rewriting writing is rewriting all the time so just just getting into that headspace that sometimes is better than others yeah i imagine when someone is as busy as yourself also that it's just more important to be finding the 20 minutes than dimming the lights and putting a record on and really getting in a certain headspace yeah well it's just it just takes so much time so you've got to grab all the time you can i'm interested in if you would think of the business as being equally split between the restaurants and the magazine, or if you think one is kind of where more of the focus is these days?

26:14I know that the magazine came first, but on the Noble Rot website, the restaurants are actually listed first. Yeah, the magazine I look at as our kind of ethos, our mouthpiece, the thing that kind of ties together the whole of the restaurants and our import business and our shops. It's kind of, it kind of tells people why why what's special about wine and why should they care so every four months when it comes out i think it's a really useful thing for us but it's not the driver of our business in terms of the business side the the business is free restaurants the wine import business and the shops that's that takes more money than a magazine a magazine in 2024 is uh you know especially one without any advertising is not a money-making enterprise on its own So it's just, I think about it in a completely different way.

27:06I think it's really important for us. I wouldn't be very, well, I wouldn't like to have free restaurants and not have a mouthpiece like we've got with the magazine, put it that way. I'm curious about your perspective on the wine world and maybe the natural wine world specifically. It's obviously changed so much over the past decade that Noble Rot has been publishing, the past decade plus that you've been publishing. How do you see the industry evolving compared to 10 years ago? And do you think the magazine's place in that has shifted as well? I think the discussion about natural wine has moved on a little bit.

27:43I think I'm in awe of the best natural winemakers because they take so many risks. They haven't got these other additives and processes that more conventional winemakers use. So they've got to be meticulously clean. they've got to you know sort their fruit even more meticulously as well than other people who are kind of you know adding things to their wines and filtering and you know more industrially made wine which is the complete antithesis of natural so I think I think there's less tolerance for badly made natural wine now and I think that maybe some of the more hardcore voices in natural wine are a little bit more tolerant of a tiny bit of sulfur if it kind of helps protect a wine um so i think we're in a much better place than we were a few years ago um i think there's a bit more tolerance um i think i mean we're into like traditionally made wine um you know typically long-aged, but we want to have wines that are organic, biodynamic, not sprayed with lots of chemicals.

28:55So it's quite a nuanced discussion, but I think it's one that has kind of grown up a little bit. Yeah, I noticed that even a little bit in some of the language that you have in the book. It seems that you prefer the term living wines as opposed to natural. What does that preference come down to? With living wines, I just kind of wanted to come up with a term which would describe these artisanally made wines that haven't got loads of additives, that aren't kind of fine and filtered and use commercial yeasts and, you know, just homogenized. And, you know, there's a lot of processes that wine can go through so it can become a consistent product that can be sent around the world and a living wine typically a lot of the wines that we sell they're they they they have you know not that much kind of well the fewer kind of processes a wine goes through in many ways the better so living wines i think they they can they're capable of these incredible highs but also they can be quite moody as well and they might not be a hundred percent consistent but I would rather have something that can really, really amaze you than something that's consistent and a bit boring.

30:11It's a bit like being on prescription drugs, I guess. It's just that every day is the same thing. That's not why we're in wine. And sometimes we will open a bottle of wine and be, you know, very disappointed by something that's from a great vineyard or a great producer. But that's kind of all part of it. And living wine is something that is kind of evolving over many years. And some years it can shut down. And if you open it at that point, it will be that disappointment. But a few years on, it can suddenly appear and blossom into this incredible thing. So that's what I was kind of getting at with living wines.

30:47Yeah, I think it's a really nice term. And I would imagine there might be some people listening right now, hopefully they're still with us, who are interested in learning more about living wine. Maybe it's not an area that they know much about. And besides reading Who's Afraid of Romani Conti, how would you suggest people kind of get immersed in that more? Well, buy Noble Rock magazine. Come to our restaurants. I mean, in America, there's plenty of other great restaurants in New York and L.A. that kind of cross over with the kind of producers that we like to drink. and you know when I go to France I'll obviously American sommeliers and uh journalists and you know of course we have American journalists writing for us too um to close today I want to play a little rapid fire taste check game with you so I'll give you a question and I'm going to make you play favorites so apologies in advance you can let me know uh the first answer that comes into your head or maybe a couple if it's quick okay okay your favorite wine growing region right now?

31:49Burgundy. Your favorite city for drinking wine? Bone in Burgundy. Your favorite London restaurant? Chez Bruce in Wandsworth is my favorite restaurant. It's got an incredible wine list, but also the menu is just full of things you want to eat and the chef is top notch. Your favorite London wine bar? That's not Noble Rot. There's one in Hagerston called Plonk. Jonathan, who's the owner, has put together a great cellar. It's full of regional wines from France and Italy and Spain and Switzerland and Alpine wines and all sorts of stuff. So that's my favourite. I really enjoyed Plonk as well the last time I was in London.