54 St Martin's Lane, London WC2 (020 7836 2645)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £90
I like language. I think it's a brilliant way of communicating stuff. Equally I get cross when it's used clumsily. The latest bit of food and drink language-torture to get me all peevish is "natural wine". The term is used to describe wines made without additives, often but not restricted to sulphur, which has been employed since the 15th century to control fermentation and stabilise the product. What a steaming pile of shameless old cobblers.For a start there is the idea of "naturalness". A quick bit of undergraduate philosophy: if the human race is a natural phenomenon, then anything we do is natural, just as it's natural for ants to make ant hills and rabbits to dig holes. It doesn't mean everything we do is fine. But it does mean that calling one thing we do natural and something else unnatural is to take the English language, jump all over it, drive a stake through its heart, cover it in butane, drop a match on it and laugh at the guttering flames.But here's what matters. Every natural wine I have ever tried has been horrible. It's felt like punishment; a sweet promise broken. If that's what additive-free wine is like – the whacking smell of a pigsty before it's been cleaned down, an acrid, grim burst of acid that makes you want to cry – then bring on the chemicals. Hurrah for sulphur. Hurrah for humankind and its ability to use all the tools at its disposal to make nice things to drink.I mention this because some of the early online mutterings about the Green Man and French Horn, a new restaurant in an old pub from the admirable team behind Terroirs and Brawn, suggested they might go big on natural wines. This made sense. The main investor in this restaurant group is the wine company Les Caves de Pyrène which numbers natural wine fetishists among its experts.
Read more at http://www.guardian.co.uk
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