During a recent stay in London, my wife and I took an early evening stroll down Lamb’s Conduit Street, in the West End district of Bloomsbury, a mere 15-minute walk from the din of Piccadilly Circus but a world away: peaceful, elegant, a medley of quaint shops and stately houses, tucked amid which was a restaurant called Noble Rot. We sat at a table. The atmosphere was convivial, the food delicious, the wine exquisitely paired. On the bar counter were copies of a small but thick magazine, also called Noble Rot, adorned with a bright hipster-cartoon cover. Out of curiosity, I bought one—and, as sometimes happens in random moments, my take on a whole slice of life began to change.
In this case, what changed was my attitude toward wine and its seriously playful possibilities. Flip through the establishment wine magazines, and you’re presented with august pronouncements, the vintages under review awarded numerical ratings, the accompanying text instructing you what flavors and aromas to expect when you open a bottle—and which of these sensations to value more or less than others.
By contrast, open up Noble Rot, and you’re instantly smacked with a more jovial vibe: Come on in and join the party! The writers, who include food and wine specialists as well as occasional celebrities—including the actress Keira Knightley, who turns out to have a wicked pen and a fine palate—are extremely well-informed, evocative, funny, and, above all, curious.
In the issue that I bought that night, No. 34, the editor’s opening piece begins, “It doesn’t take an ancient Greek philosopher to recognize that the more you learn about wine, the more you know you don’t know.” (I can’t imagine Wine Enthusiast publishing that sentence.) This was by way of introducing an essay about the great wines of Switzerland—a tough subject, as Swiss vintners export just 1 percent of their output. So, the editor set off to explore the country’s “spectacular mountainside vineyards,” sat for long, sloshy conversations with the beyond-obscure “Alpine masters,” and reported back every detail.
he piece on Swiss wine, it turned out, was an outlier; the magazine sticks mainly to the oenophile’s standard map of Europe: France, Italy, Spain, Greece. But even there, it focuses on small, little-known wineries, many of them run by a single person.
In a recent Zoom conversation, the editor of Noble Rot, Dan Keeling, described the typical operator of such vineyards as “an obsessive, a dreamer” who “makes hundreds, maybe thousands of decisions”—about treating the soil, adjusting to the weather, calibrating the tannins, determining when to pick the grapes, and figuring out how to store them, to name just a few—“and they all add up to the final thing,” which, with any luck, might be magic.
In his own evolution as a writer and editor, as well as a purveyor and lover of these wines, Keeling has also become an obsessive and a dreamer. And one clear aim of Noble Rot is to entice readers into becoming obsessives and dreamers too.
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