Support Your Local Indie - Use Them or Lose Them

You'll miss them when they're gone ...

Retail is a brutal business; sectors and businesses that seemed solid a few decades ago are now a bloodbath - high-street retail in areas like banking and fashion have been well and truly disrupted by technology.

The sectors that continue to do well on the high street today are the sorts of activities that you can only do them in person - nail bars, hair dressers and coffee shops.

There is a saying that with every purchase you make, you are making a choice about the kind of world you want to live in.

Do you want a vibrant, thriving local scene of independent businesses; or a cut-price clone town of standardised, race-to-the-bottom chains?

If the former, then don't forget that you need to keep visiting local traders to ensure they stay in business.

If you want your local independent wine merchant to be around in, say, February, then maybe consider spending some money with them in January. Less-but-better January might just ensure that your local independent can pay staff wages and put food on the table in the quiet season and still be there for you on Valentine's day, throughout the summer and in the run up to Christmas party season again.

Local indies in the Cambridge area include:

- Cambridge Wine Merchants, who have bars as well as shops
- Noel Young Wines, have a new wine shop and bar
- Bacchanalia, two sites in Cambridge including one in the hub of independent shopping, Mill Road
- Private Cellar, MW-sourced wines from a small internet retailer
- Thirsty and Thirsty and Hungry, small, quirky and iconoclastic - and that's just the owner
- Joseph Barnes Wines, handcrafted wines from small, independent chateaux

And it's not just independent wine merchants.

Be it your local pub, café, bakery or Spanish private chef, remember to use them or lose them.

Wines of the Gard at Thirsty

A tasting of Gard wines with Thirsty Cambridge

Sam Owens' vision for his Thirsty wine bars in Cambridge is that they should do more than just sell bottles of wine; they should be part of a European-style scene where you come for the local produce - artisan bread, cheese and coffee as well as a glass of wine - and stay for the atmosphere.

Go to more or less any French town and this is a way of life; you can make up an inexpensive "market picnic" from local produce. It is only a couple of weeks since I introduced the family to the joys of oysters and white wine at on the banks of the Charente. For just a few euros, we had six oysters, served on ice, with a wedge of lemon and unlimited fresh bread.

This sort of thing is rather harder to do in Britain, however, where regional artisan food is virtually non-existent and the combination of high shop rents and a northern, protestant work ethic discourages lingering in cafes.

However, none of that is stopping Sam from pressing ahead with plans to create a food-and-drink culture scene in Cambridge, of which more in due course.

Just back from a holiday in the Gard in southern France, Sam had brought some local wines to try out with a view to stocking them if they proved popular enough..

Gard is not an especially well-known region - just west of the Rhône but technically in Occitanie, it includes the appellation of Costières de Nîmes, but little else of any fame. This makes it a place of innovation and experimentation, with cheap land, plentiful sunshine and no heritage to maintain or be constrained by.

Most of these wines were labelled as vin de France as they are somewhat iconoclastic in style and do not conform to any regional archetypes.

I tasted through all of them with Sam and the style will be familiar to anyone who knows his palate - vibrant, fresh and drinkable with low tannins and low alcohol, a world apart from the standard Rhône characteristics of dark-berry fruit, spice, supple tannins and plenty of ripeness.

Mostly southern GSM-blends, there were also a couple of curveballs; a Sangiovese and a very funky-nosed Cinsault. However, the doozy of the pack was Partouze; made from 13 grape varieties, it is cloudy reddish-pink, chilled and tastes somewhere between fermenting grape must, cider and a hoppy ale. All of this in a good way.

Topping and tailing the tasting were perhaps my two favourite wines of the evening; Gard du Nord, a vibrant, juicy and compelling Grenache with lots of flavour yet just 12% alcohol and Mont de Marie, a more conventional Rhône-esque red with dark fruit and a supple texture.

Indigo Wines at Thirsty

A tasting of Indigo Wines at Cambridge's Thirsty & Hungry

He doesn't have spiky hair and studs, but Sam Owens is still something of a punk; the man behind Thirsty and now Thirsty & Hungry (they also serve food), he is energetic, visionary and iconoclastic.

The Thirsty empire is not just about selling drinks, but more a social way of life and bringing people together. The wine list changes regularly and is low on classics or standards; instead there is a real mixture of places, grapes, production methods and packaging.

The consistency of Thirsty is in the quality and the style, a well-made, vibrant freshness; it is a place where you go to explore rather than simply return to the same again.

The latest addition is a range of wines from Indigo, a multi-award-winning importer with a reputation as one of the UK's most interesting independent importers of quirky, artisanal wines. With a particular strength in Iberia, they champion small producers who practise low intervention approaches.

My highlights were:

Dão Branco (Alvaro Castro, Portugal)  bright and fresh Portuguese white made from indigenous varieties with zesty citrus and a  mineral finish

Soplo (Rafael Cambra, Spain) fresh, perfumed Garnacha with touch of earth and leather

Dajoar (Andreas Bender, Mosel)  off-dry with a playful sweetness that balances out the crisp acidity. This is beautifully bright and fresh, with plenty of green and yellow fruits, great intensity and grip on the mid- palate and a long mineral finish

7 Fuentes (Suertes del Marqués, Tenerife) a blend of several plots, all on volcanic soils, and its main component is the wildly aromatic Listán Negro, followed by a small amount of Tintilla (aka Trousseau), juicy and refreshing

Three Wine Men in Cambridge

The Three Wine Men event returns to Cambridge

Another year, another Three Wine Men Christmas tasting; this time round there were noticeably fewer local independents.

With just a three-hour slot and over 30 exhibitors in the hall, there was no chance to get round everyone. So I focused on local heroes and noteworthy wines.

Cambridge Distillery

Meeting both of these criteria was Cambridge Distillery whose gins are something of a revelation. Owner Will Lowe cites three points of difference from pretty much any other gin you might try: all botanicals are fresh and seasonal, all are distilled separately and then blended separately.

Will's house gin is the Cambridge Dry Gin - fragrant, floral and perfumey with juniper and menthol, a firm grip leading onto a round sweetness. Very Good.

A step up is the Cambridge Botanical Gardens Gin with flavourings picked from the Botanical Gardens just up the road from the distillery. With rosemary, lavender and apples descended from Newton's tree, this is a more nuanced and elegant gin. Very Good Indeed.

The Truffle Gin is flavoured with white truffles from alba and is intended as a digestif, a gin for whisky-lovers. The musky white truffle dominates the nose leading to more juniper on the palate. Very Good.

Thorne Wines

New kid on the local oenological block is Thorne Wines, run by James Thorne, formerly of Cambridge Wine Merchants.

The white Rioja Perica Olagasa Blanco 2017 is a complex, nutty, fresh, leesy spicy old-school Rioja. Good.

The red Perica Olagasa Reserva 2010 is fresh, youthful and still primary with bramble fruits and spice; mellow and harmonious.

Also good and tasted on a previous occasion is the Vondeling Chardonnay.

Thirsty

Wine merchants inevitably reflect the personalities of their founders; Thirsty's wines are iconoclastic and zeitgeisty. There was South African Southern French / Pinotage blend with juicy fresh berry fruit, a Southern French Chardonnay that was fresh with a southern warmth and an orange wine that was highly drinkable and pleasant rather than challenging.

Chateau Musar

A vertical of Lebanon's Musar showed how this amazing wine develops: the 2011 red, the current vintage, is complex, harmonious and meaty with dried red berries, spice and freshness and just the beginnings of some secondary woodsy undergrowth alongside dried red fruits. Very Good.

The 2000 is paler with more secondary aromas of sous bois and truffles, but the fruit is still good and it will continue to age. Very Good.

The 1998 is very pale and almost tawny port-esque, very harmonious and mellow. At a peak and my top of the three vintages on show. Very Good.

I had not known about the Musar White, but got a chance to try the 2009. Complex, with nuts and oaky spices, waxy and old school, it is a unique textured wine that somewhat defies definition but is in the same category as amontillado, vin jaune and white Rioja. Very Good.

New Zealand Wine

If you think New Zealand is just Sauvignon Blanc, then look away now.

Greywacke Chardonnay 2014 is a complex, elegant and ageworthy oaked Chardonnay; fresh citrus and orchard fruits, gently toasty oak. Substantial and deft. very Good.

Greywacke Pinot Noir 2014 fresh, delicate and crystalline with elegant red fruits; supple and harmonious. Very Good.

Sud de France

Quality, consistency and affordability were all high here - these were some really lovely wines.

Domaine Morin-Langron Etiquette Noir 2017 fresh, elegant and long Picpoul. Good.

Ch Canet 2017 waxy, spicy, warming southern white blend. Good.

Domaine de Cebene Felgaria 2015 pruney fruit, feral, mineral red blend; concentrated, supple and fresh. Very Long. Very Good.

Ch de Prieure des Mourgues Grande Reserve 2015 poised, focused, concentrated St Chinian red blend. Fine tannins and will age. Very Good.

Alpine Wines

Swiss wines can be lovely, but they are always expensive; if you set next-door Burgundy as a benchmark, then they are reasonable value.

Provins Petite Arvine Grand Metral 2016 fresh, lemony and elegant. Good.

Birthday Drinks at Thirsty Cambridge

(Not my) birthday drinks at Thirsty Cambridge

I don't do north of the river in Cambridge, especially after dark - the delineations of my world are a curve of the Cam intersected by the railway line.

But a friend's birthday get-together at recently-opened Thirsty Cambridge took me across a literal as well as metaphorical border to Mitcham's Corner.

North-of-the-river Cambridge is a bit like East London - urban, edgy and gentrifying.

As its only wine bar, Thirsty has something of a captive audience. The set-up is simple - long benches, low mark-ups, a range of mostly classic Old World wines and a different mobile street-food van parked outside every night. Plus craft beers on tap.

It all feels rather studenty-shabby, which is presumably why it appealed to a bunch of dressed-down 50-somethings who have aged three decades without quite fully acknowledging it.

In our makeshift 6th form common room, the talk was of second marriages and third careers, of funerals and grandchildren rather than the iconoclasm of radical politics and the world set to rights.

As to the wines, there was an elegant English fizz from Hereford, a bold, spicy red from Vacqueyras and a Langhe Nebbiolo that was a touch cloudy.

A return visit is but a matter of time.

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