Terroirs

A recent quiet Friday afternoon allowed us the chance to bag a table at the wine industry's drinking hole of choice. Very Gallic and stuffed full of waiters with real enthusiasm for their metier, this is a wine bar that offers an enormous range with a strong emphasis on organic, unfiltered, unfined sulphate free offerings regardless of where they sit on the appellation hierarchy.

To drink here, take advice and ignore your preconceptions about correct wine. If it's served cloudy, it's meant to be. The wine list runs to forty pages and our choices were all light as they followed a long lunch and required that we still be able to converse politely by the evening.

We tried a 2008 Chasselas from Jean-Pierre Frick, leading light of the bio dynamic movement. This is typically a Swiss grape but in this Alsace example offers a fruit packed yeasty, almost ciderish quality, a result of it's being left on the lees. It is a light and refreshing wine held together with a fine backbone of acidity. A 2003Riesling Bihl from the same maker offered typical perfumed notes with a fantastic schisty mineral aroma. A 2008 Morgon Classique from Domaine Jean Foillard was a hazy unfiltered wine stuffed fill of light red fruits and a touch of minerality with a complete absence of the banana and bubblegum notes of carbonic maceration so typical of Beaujolais.

We downed plenty of small plates of charcuterie and fromage. Food portion sizes are small but the quality is excellent.

Terroirs offers real competition to Vinoteca over in Farringdon and each bottle of wine took us leagues further away from anything you will find in a supermarket or major retailers. The food alone would be enough to encourage a return visit but the sheer diversity of the wine list means you will always find a new expression of a grape to enjoy. This of course is the whole point of wine so we shall without doubt return.