Talking Wine with Dan Keeling

“There’s two sorts of non-fiction books,” Dan Keeling says, as we sit down for lunch and a glass of wine at Noble Rot, “There’s pleasure givers and then there’s problem solvers.”

If you had to categorise Dan’s new book, Pick Your Bottles, it might have to be a problem solver. Although it does have a pleasure to it, too. How could a journey through some of the most exciting and interesting wines and wine makers working today, be anything but?

The book, subtitled 100 Wines to Change the Way You Drink, is a guide to a hundred wines, largely from across Europe, chosen to help you make better drinking decisions. It is also, as Dan sees it, a way into the subject: a compendium of how to drink, where to drink, what to buy, and how to develop a taste of your own.

But it is also a journey into wine culture, told through the people who make it, the places it comes from and the stories that surround it. There is little of the exclusionary language that sometimes obscures wine, instead, Pick Your Bottles offers a gentle entry into the various pleasures of the grape.

“Being dogmatic about anything is off-putting, it’s a similar snobbery just packaged in a different way.”

Dan started Noble Rot over a decade ago, first as a magazine, then as a restaurant and wine bar. The original, where we’re having lunch, is on Lamb’s Conduit Street, with further outposts opening in Soho and Mayfair. Before that, he worked in the music industry, in A&R at Parlophone and then Island Records. It was while working at Island, in 2006, that he began to fall in love with wine.

There was a good wine shop next door to his office, he explains. Until then, wine had largely been something he drank while entertaining people without knowing much about what was in the glass. As an A&R, he was spending a great deal of time taking people out and drinking wine. It was, he says, “like not knowing how to swim and living next door to the sea”.

That willingness to begin without knowing everything has informed much of Dan’s work since. When he started writing about wine, it was during a moment when natural wine was beginning to come to prominence. It was something new and exciting and youthful. He likens the movement to punk rock: not always particularly good, perhaps, but important in lowering the barriers to entry, and in changing the conversation. It offered something interesting to drink right now, and with a story attached, rather than a bottle that might need years of ageing or a great deal of prior knowledge.

Natural wine, he says, helped bring younger drinkers into the world of wine. “It was all about  accessibility and a DIY spirit, and that was really important to change the kind of conversation surrounding wine and to bring younger generations into it.” But he is wary of the dogma that has grown up around it. The natural wine scene, too, can have its own hierarchy, with a small group of fashionable producers becoming the accepted taste. “Being dogmatic about anything is off-putting, it’s a similar snobbery just packaged in a different way.”

“You can have a fifty quid bottle, like a lot of the bottles in this book, and it’s a luxurious experience. It makes you feel something, there can be just as interesting a culture to that, and it’s worth exploring.”

For Dan, the best natural wine producers are among the best in the world, precisely because the work is so demanding. The wine has to be made with care, from the vineyard onwards. But natural wine is not a prerequisite for a good bottle, nor is it a category he feels the need to defend. “I want it to be as organic as it possibly can be, and most of it is. But if you’re drinking old Bordeaux from the eighties that is not organic.”

For all his connoisseurship, he has a resolutely down-to-earth way of talking about wine. He is interested in what makes a bottle enjoyable, rather than in the technical details that can sometimes stand in the way of that enjoyment. At Noble Rot, he encourages the staff to talk about the people and places behind the wine, rather than simply describing its characteristics. “I always say to our staff, don’t go to the table and talk about residual sugar and acidity and tannins and what it tastes like. That’s kind of superfluous.”

Instead, tell the story of the producer, region or a particular way of making something, these are as much the story of a wine as a specific language of tasting notes. This is also the approach that runs through Noble Rot magazine, which has always placed wine within a wider cultural ecosystem of music, art, literature.

Pick Your Bottles is also a departure from his previous work Who’s Afraid of Romanée-Conti? An exploration of wine at its highest end. But a book with Romanée-Conti on the cover could easily be mistaken for something aimed at the super rich, and Dan wanted to make the point that luxury is not necessarily defined by price, but by how something makes you feel. “You can have a fifty quid bottle, like a lot of the bottles in this book, and it’s a luxurious experience. It makes you feel something, there can be just as interesting a culture to that, and it’s worth exploring.”

Pick Your Bottles began with a title and a very clear brief. He wanted to make a useful, usable, actionable book, and he knew exactly who he was writing it for: two friends from his days in the music business, Alex, a graphic designer, and Mike, a live agent. Both enjoyed wine, but neither wanted to be lectured about it or default to the obvious brands.

“Most people want something good in the moment, don’t they? There’s this thing where people think that the more you pay, the more pleasure you should get, but it’s just not true. You can just end up paying a fortune and just have a crap time.”

Mike, for instance, wanted an alternative to Whispering Angel, the rosé he and his wife drank every summer. Something better, perhaps, but not too expensive, difficult to find or taxing. Alex wanted to make better decisions when he was in a wine shop or wine bar. They also had more practical questions: what to eat with a bottle, what to drink on a Sunday afternoon, what to bring to a dinner party.

The book’s wines were chosen with these questions in mind, and he approached the writing with a checklist: “Does it tell you why it matters in the first two or three sentences? Can it be expressed with a clarity to the language that Mike and Alex will understand? If I cut this entry out of the book, will it make it a worse book?”

Confidence is central to Dan’s thinking about wine. He invokes the poet John Keats’s idea of negative capability: “Being able to be in awe of something very beautiful without feeling inferior, because you don’t know how it’s created.” You can look at a great painting or hear a great poem without having to understand its construction. Wine, however, can make people feel as though they need to know something before they are allowed to enjoy it.

And it is worth remembering, Dan explains, that the cheapest wine from a great producer may be the best choice. The more expensive bottles, and particularly the rarer ones, can be denser and more structured, and may need ten or twenty years in the cellar to soften and reveal their complexities. That is all well and good if you have the space and time, the patience and the inclination to age a bottle. But for most people, there is a dinner to cook and friends coming round.

“Most people want something good in the moment, don’t they?” Dan says. “There’s this thing where people think that the more you pay, the more pleasure you should get, but it’s just not true. You can just end up paying a fortune and just have a crap time.”

Writing the book brought him back to the wines people actually want to drink, and to the question of what to open when you are having dinner with six friends, three of whom don’t care very much about wine.

“The success of the book will be if people can go and buy a few bottles and they actually like the bottles, and then that leads them onto something.”

“You need something that’s good enough to keep the ones who like wine satisfied,” he says. “And so I think there’s quite a lot of wines in the book that do that.”

It is a simple idea, but one that gets to the heart of Pick Your Bottles. The book is not about knowing the right answer, or buying the most expensive bottle, or being able to talk about wine in a particular way. It is about finding something you enjoy, and having enough of a story to go with it.

When I ask Dan what he would open for friends, he has a few suggestions. Artuke, a Rioja red, is a bargain for the quality; Trenzado, a white from Tenerife made with Listán Blanco grapes grown on volcanic soils, has an unusual smoky character that he likens to Frazzles. There is also Paolo Bea’s Sagrantino from Umbria, a bigger, more rustic wine that he describes as soulful and delicious. They are very different bottles, but each makes the same point: there is a great deal to discover without spending a great deal of money. “The success of the book,” he says, “will be if people can go and buy a few bottles and they actually like the bottles, and then that leads them onto something.”