Our fellow Master of Wine and rabid promoter of natural wine Isabelle Legeron is holding her second natural wine fair this coming Sunday and Monday.
The RAW wine fair will take place as last year in the old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane not too far from Liverpool Street stations and closest to Shoreditch High Street overground station. RAW's website, as last year, is not very helpful about the precise location – unless you manage to find this sketch map. I'm going to budget an extra 20 minutes to find it.
For only the second time ever, Julia, José and I will be presenting a tasting based on our book Wine Grapes on the Sunday afternoon 3-4 pm and will be selling and signing books before and after. We'll be at the Pages bookseller's stand near the entrance from 2.30 and Pages will be selling books on the Monday too.
More than 150 producers will be showing their wines in this thoroughly East London space with nice, bright overhead light. And one of the most attractive features is the unusually high quality of the food on offer from a range of purveyors and – get this – one of them, Elliot's Café of Borough Market who will be barbecuing on the patio, will use 'single species English charcoal which, when burned, gives off its own unique smoke flavours and heat range'.
They do take sustainability serious and are shipping in much of the wine, at dangerously short notice it seems to me, by boat from Brittany. It is due to dock at 4.30pm on Thursday. The 1962 Mil'Pat is a traditional Breton malamok (multi-purpose sailing vessel) that is now a carbon-neutral cargo ship. Her six tonnes of cargo will include 3,000 bottles of wine. Mil'Pat belongs to TransOceanic Wine Transport, a company set up in 2009 to prove the viability of cargo sail-shipping that has already shipped some wine to Noma in Copenhagen. The arrival of the Mil'Pat at St Katharine's Dock will be followed by a press conference at The Victualler natural wine bar in nearby Wapping devoted to the sustainability of shipping for the wine industry.