Wine, naturally

I visited Jean-Pierre Robinot back in July 2013 at a time when I was struggling to keep up the blog so the account I wrote at the time never got posted. But looking back on it I think it captures something about the man and his wines worth recording...

It’s not often I spend a whole week drinking natural wine but I’ve been in Paris with my husband who drinks nothing else, given the chance. And we’ve been hanging out in restaurants and bars that have natural wine lists.
So here are a few things we’ve enjoyed, where we’ve drunk them and what we ate with them. As usual I’ve rated them from green to red - see my traffic lights system, right....

While we pick up most of our recommendations online, it’s always good to discover somewhere for yourself as we did a couple of months back heading back up the rue du Cherche Midi and stumbling upon Sauvage.
Having recently opened it consisted of a few shelves of natural wines and the standard wine bar fare of cheese and charcuterie. Now it has a few hot dishes too prepared in a minute space at the back by the owner Sebastien Leroy with the aid of a sharp...

I’m not sure what’s in the air but there’s been a lot of impassioned debate about natural wine this week - both pro and anti.
Natural wine advocate Isabelle Legeron referred to it in the Guardian as ‘life in a glass’. Jay Rayner countered that they were ‘brutal’ (scroll down to the comments below the piece). Wine critic Tim Atkin referred to it on Twitter as ‘primitive wine...