Dear Readers,
We are with you, again, on the Lord’s day. Issue 9 is with the printers, and Issue 10 is being readied, so it’s all hands on deck at the moment. This time out, there are some little bits on Boris Becker and Sally Rooney, but first, we have another guest slot.
Henry Jeffreys is the author of Empire of Booze, a particularly interesting study of how the historic patterns of the British taste for alcohol helped shape the way the world drinks today. Most of the people who read this newsletter have refined tastes (we think?) so we thought it would be a good idea to have a wine column. Here is that wine column.
The Thrifty Connoisseur
I know what you’re thinking, what with all these queues for petrol and bare supermarket shelves, it’s about time I started a wine cellar. There’s no shortage of information out thereon the subject but the best advice I’ve had comes from a now-defunct blog called Sediment: ‘1) Buy wine 2) DON'T DRINK IT!!’
Once you’ve decided to start a cellar, it’s a question of where to buy your wine. I’m assuming that, like me, you are trying to raise a family on a writer’s salary, with only the occasional meagre bequest from deceased relatives keeping your nose above water. I cannot, therefore, recommend one of those trendy wine merchants that started to appear in British cities around 2009, exploiting the gap left by the decline of Oddbins, Bottoms Up et al.
I remember my first experience with one such place. I was living in Bethnal Green when Bottle Apostle opened across Victoria Park from my flat. It was a lavishly appointed shop, with enomatic machines, so you could buy small tasting samples of expensive wines – most of which I had never heard of. Opening in east London around the time of the financial crash, and offering very little below £10, I gave it six months at best. Much to my amazement, not only did it survive, it thrived and other new wine merchants opened within walking distance, including one run by French hipsters on Hackney Road which sold austere natural wines from the Loire with not much available below £30.
These places are fun with their esoteric lists, but the wines can be maddeningly unpredictable, especially if you’re on a budget. Clearly there are plenty of people in London who don’t mind taking a risk on a £20-30 bottle of wine that might not be to their taste. I’m just not one of them.
The Frenchsters were unusual in that they actually imported their own wine. Most independent wine merchants will buy from a wholesaler like Liberty Wines or Fields Morris & Verdin. There might be lots of talk about, ‘visiting my growers’, but this is often means a jolly at the importer’s expense, or just attending a tasting in London. The usual mark-up will be between 30-40% on top of wholesale prices. It sounds like a lot but once the rent has been paid, staff costs accounted for and the various council hoops jumped through, there’s very little profit left.
A few years ago, when the writing work wasn’t pouring in, I worked part time at one such shop in south-east London. The owner was so terrified of giving away margin, that she actually winced when I asked for a staff discount. I didn’t last long. You do, however, come across retailers who are frankly taking the piss. There’s a shop near my house selling Chateau Ksara Reserve de Couvent for more than £20 a bottle. I’m happy to pay a little more to support a local business but not when it’s charging nearly double the price that The Wine Society offers.
So, you’re not going to get a bargain on the high street. Next time out, I’ll recommend some merchants who sell the sort of solid £8-15 bottles that fill my cellar. Yes, I do actually have a small cellar, but you can ignore the soi-disant experts who tell you that you need either a proper underground cellar or a ‘wine fridge’ that mimics cellar conditions in order to keep wine.
I finished the last bottle of a case of 2009 Bordeaux (Sarget to Gruaud Larose, in case you’re interested) this year. It tasted superb despite having spent most of its life stored under the stairs in a council flat in Lewisham. Unless you’re planning to keep your wine longer, your ‘cellar’ just needs to be dark, and not get too hot or cold. In a cupboard by an outside wall should be fine for a few years. Wine can be surprisingly resilient, but whatever you do,
don’t use the racks that come in fitted kitchens, usually right next to the oven. Bottles left there will be suitable only for mulling, and that won’t do for readers of The Fence.
You can follow Henry on Twitter here. He will be back in a month’s time with another column and a very special offer for you all.
Woodward And Bernstein
As we have mentioned far too many times, there is a move to more serious reportage in the magazine for the rest of 2021 and beyond. This time last year, we sent a young journalist undercover to explore the sick, sad world of conversion therapy, a practice which the government is now actively trying to ban.
An amusing coda: after we sent the findings to a member of the True Freedom Trust for comment, one of their employees bought a back issue of the magazine under a pseudonym where they had replaced their surname with numbers. However, their clandestine research was all in vain, as they had used their work email address to make the purchase. We’re sure that we’ll encounter wilier adversaries in the future...
Baron Von Slam
Last Thursday, a member of staff spent all working at Frieze, the contemporary art fair held in Regent’s Park that draws the world’s super-rich to London for a week of auctions, private views and bellowing at each other over drinks at Chiltern Firehouse. Needless to say, it was a hard old slog, but one of the few moments of levity came when our scribe passed Boris Becker, who was heard to Germanically intone ‘yeah, yeah, Gstaad is cool’ to his much-younger companion. We can only imagine that Becker, who has bankruptcy restrictions placed on his finances until 16 October, 2031, was looking for a fresh dealer to offload his collection of memorabilia, and wasn’t looking to sink what remains of his winnings on a canvas by Doron Langberg.
As You Like It
There are going to be less than 100 copies of Issue 9 available for retail sale through our webstore, and less than three weeks until the magazines arrive from the printers in Lithuania. So do make rapid haste to the webstore and sign up today for a subscription to get your dainty fingers on a copy.
Doing the Blackstock Walk
When is a feature not a feature? When it’s a scowling walk around Seven Sisters, as we learned from the esteemable characters at MyLondon Dot News this week. Here at The Fence we like to go high where they go low, but sometimes a feature is so risible that we have no choice but to proffer it to you. And this is the offending article, a safari through one of London’s poorest areas, commissioned off the back of a Reddit thread determining ‘London’s biggest shitholes’. The eagle-eyed among you might notice that our link comes from the Wayback Machine; the head honchos at Reach Plc perhaps decided that this dispatch from the bleeding edge of Zone 3 might not concord with their mission of hyperlocal reportage from the capital.
Beautiful Sally, Where Aren’t You?
In the deepest crevices of the Radical Centre a storm has been brewing. Sally Rooney, the Irish literary sensation and bucket-hat impresario, has drawn criticism from Ben Judah for declining to reprint her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, into Hebrew through the Modan Publishing House (a subsidiary of the Israeli Ministry of Defence).
Judah, echoing sentiments published in the Jewish-American magazine, The Forward, argues that Rooney ‘won’t allow her new novel to be translated into Hebrew’, which from his reading contravenes the principles of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) campaign enacted worldwide in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Rooney has since clarified that she would be honoured to translate her works into the language, however in that yawning eight-hour vacuum, all manner of aspersions were cast about the Irish character in lieu of clarification. We promised that we’d stop covering literary trivia, but this one spilled into a life of its own, with journo-adjacent commentators intoning about ‘pre-Vatican anti-Judaism lurking in Irish culture’. Judah, to his credit, has offered his considerable talents to Ms Rooney in helping her find an appropriate Hebrew translator: who said chivalry is dead?
In Case You Missed It
How deep is deep? Watch this astonishing video to compare how far you can go underwater.
Up and coming writer, Marina Hyde, muses on the eco-credentials of the House of Windsor.
The subculture that no one could have predicted: when medieval mysticism conquers the dancefloor.
Illuminati Tinder: Kyle Chayka scores a BTS look at the famously exclusive dating app, Raya.
Jenny Zhang explores the bad-faith weaponisation of identity and identity politics.
And Finally
At the age of 88, Michael Caine has announced that contrary to reports, he’s not retiring after all. So it’s time to dust off one of the all-time talk-show greats, it’s Michael Caine impersonating Michael Caine.
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A shorter iteration than usual: an absolutely vicious lurgy has been circulating London and has taken out the poor, benighted editor. Next Friday, we’ll be joining you with a longer player, and also some new articles, too, which we hope you will enjoy.
In the meantime, if you would like to speak to a member of the editorial staff, then please do reply to this email, and we will get back to you tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.
All the best,
TF
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