Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew on Australian wine & hospitality
The irreverent Noble Rot brand traverses a cult magazine, a trio of lauded London restaurants and an international wholesale business, all of which are changing the conversation about wine.
Wine is as interesting now as it’s ever been in its history,” smirks Mark Andrew, one half of Noble Rot, the renegade British magazine turned restaurant project, wine store and distribution business. Andrew, a master of wine, and business partner Dan Keeling, an awarded food and wine writer and former record label manager, have created one of the most captivating and approachable sources of wine information in the industry.
Today the pair, who call London home, find themselves tens of thousands of kilometres away in Melbourne, where they are visiting as part of the annual Melbourne Food and Wine festival. WISH is chatting with them after their commandeering of the wine list and food menu of Fitzroy institution Marion Wine Bar. Andrew and Keeling, as well as Noble Rot restaurants’ executive chef Stephen Harris, brought their signature wit to the events, in addition to their famous Noble Rot chalkboard, where the day’s wines by the glass are listed.
Noble Rot, in all its forms, is celebrated for bringing a fresh, interesting, and more relatable voice to the world of wine. Within the pages of the magazine, contributors and celebrities join Andrew and Keeling to bring glimpses into the multifaceted world of winemaking. The pair taps everyone from actors and authors to politicians and DJs – some with an established appreciation for wine, others with a budding interest – to bring their perspectives and palates to drops from around the globe.
The affable and approachable duo is just as happy venerating the most revered of grand crus in Burgundy as they are getting their boots dirty in the terraced plantings of Galicia, Spain where the steep and sleepy vineyards of Ribeira Sacra are being resurrected to produce some of the world’s most exciting wines. Whether you’re savouring a glass at one of their restaurants, or flipping through the mag’s pages, the two experiences exist as a continuation of the other.
“There’s a type of wine that we like to sell and we like to talk about in the magazine. And that’s ‘living wines’, rather than what we call ‘dead wines’. Wines that haven’t been ultra-manipulated and processed within an inch of their life,” Keeling says.
“These are wines that are made with a regard and respect for the grapes, the soil, and an understanding of where these wines sit in the context of the industry. They’re wines that aren’t pretending to be anything else, nor do they need to.”
Andrew agrees: “There’s a certain template of wine, from a general perspective in terms of how it’s made, how it’s conceived, and how the grapes are grown, that we gravitate towards. It’s great that there seems to be an increasing number of Australian wineries that are following a similar kind of ethos, too.” He singles out smaller producers Timo Mayer and Luke Lambert from Victoria’s Yarra Valley as two vignerons whose bottles feature at Noble Rot’s wine stores and on the lists at its three London restaurants.
Australian wine is something Andrew and Keeling have long explored and appreciated. “Giaconda, we’ve been drinking for years,” Keeling shares. “It’s probably one of the greatest Australian wines, and to see their evolution from one style into the more streamlined style of the moment is kind of garnering a lot of praise, which is really interesting.”
What winemaker Rick Kinzbrunner, and now his son Nathan, have done with this award-winning winery in Beechworth is astonishing. Giaconda’s chardonnay has stratospheric presence and has won fans the world over. Its older vintages, Keeling points out, remind him of old-school white Burgundy, singling out wines from René Lafon, a revered producer who once helmed the acclaimed Domaine des Comtes Lafon estate, for comparison. These days wines from Comtes Lafon command three to four times the retail price of the local Giaconda.
Keeling also makes mention of Mount Mary, another Yarra Valley winery visited on this trip. “We adored [the cabernets] for their harmony and restraint, and which reminded us of the kind of great old-school clarets that have become harder to find.
“Our last visit to Robert Walters’ Place of Changing Winds was a revelation,” he adds. The vineyard, located in the Macedon Ranges, has won praise at home from James Halliday and other critics, thanks to the fastidious work of Walters and his team. It’s now the first Australian winery being distributed in the UK as part of Keeling Andrew & Co. – the parent company and importation arm of Noble Rot.
While the pair’s encyclopaedic knowledge of wine would perhaps have you thinking that a simple Tuesday night drop would call for the opening of a dusty bottle of something that had managed to survive a world war, the truth is they know what the modern drinker wants.
“Accessibility and approachability are absolutely at the top of our agenda,” Keeling says. “But it doesn’t need to be exclusive from other things, like quality and authenticity.”
The art for the two of them is finding that sweet spot between telling a story people want to hear and are willing to get involved in via their palate, but one that also speaks favourably to their wallet. This informs what they write about, pour in their restaurants and import.
Change, in the wine world, is traditionally glacial. Estates often remain in the same family for centuries, and shifts in style and method are often met with ire from drinkers, and even old-school critics. But in the wider world of wine, including hospitality, change is tangible right now. While the pair is reluctant to claim any huge influence, they are proud of the way they have put wine in the conversation at their venues. And they take the training of their staff very seriously.
“We built as much of the company as we could on helping to develop them [the staff] and helping them to become better wine professionals,” Keeling says. “It’s something that is really central to the experience at Noble Rot restaurants.
“There’s plenty of other places that have come along since that have sought to do something similar. Whether or not that’s our influence, I don’t know? But I’d like to think that if we did have a positive role to play that it could have been something to do with that.”
Noble Rot has done a lot in the past decade. Even a book. “We’ve been really riding on the crest of this tsunami of change in the world of wine,” Andrew says. “And we’re still riding that wave.” As new vineyards emerge, and further generational shifts in winemaking become established, the nose of Noble Rot will no doubt follow. We’ve just got to hope that their next trip to Australia extends beyond Victoria.
This story is from the May issue of WISH.
