Cool bar, warm drinks

Anyone who has ever been to a vineyard will know that their chateaux are robust buildings, often with whitewashed walls and always with tightly shuttered windows to keep the internal temperature down. Their wines are often stored in even cooler underground cellars, conditions that viniculturists often refer to as 'room temperature'.

Heat and light, you see, are the natural enemies of wine, with overexposure from either often resulting in the 'souring' of the contents of a bottle --particularly with red wines. At this time of year, 'room temperature' in London is very much higher than red wines were ever meant to endure, which is why I often ask staff to serve them in an ice bucket.

They often bore me by saying, 'Sir, you do know you have ordered a red wine, don't you?' Tempting as it might be to play the role of the dastardly curmudgeon (and I am always armed with a few hundred put-downs), my advice is to nod politely and continue conversing with the table leg (if you're on your own).

I mention this because I visited the Priory - a new bar in Clerkenwell, not the celeb rehab centre - on a particularly warm evening to find their wines stored in glass-fronted, halogen-lit cases behind the bar.

Perhaps I'm being harsh on the Priory, for this practice is commonplace in London, but when I asked if I could have a bottle that wasn't being 'slow-cooked', I was told this wouldn't be possible. A crisply chilled rosé, then, seemed to be the obvious alternative. It was cool, rather than chilled.

I could have had a beer, but I've all but given up the pedestrian brands of Foster's, Kronenbourg and John Smith's Smooth. Although the bottled selection here includes Grimbergen Blonde and Budvar, given that London has so many quality beers available these days, the Priory offering smacks of wilful neglect.

The bar is housed in a new development just off the Clerkenwell Road, has a double-height, raw industrial interior - a popular design back in the Nineties - of scaffolding and giant air-conditioning ducts, and with a galleried upper level (think All Bar One with squashy sofas and you're not a hundred miles away).

The food is nice enough, though. Starters of asparagus with blood orange hollandaise (£5), and smoked haddock fish cake with a poached egg (£5.50) are fabulous dishes. Mains of cider-baked ham (£10.50), beefburger with pineapple and fries (£9.50) and a summer salad of asparagus, goats' cheese, new potatoes and spinach (£8.50) are well-prepared substantial dishes that are hard to find fault with.

But my friend Audrey ordered a whole crab (£9.50) after being assured that the chef would dress it for her. It wasn't, so she struggled with the pincers. We were amused by her discomfort when fragments of cracked shell flew across the table.

Will I go back? I might, actually, because we were able to get a table with ease, even on a Friday evening. But Clerkenwell has a whole host of places with a vastly superior drinks offering (the nearby Dovetail on Jerusalem Passage is an example of one such) which, I fear, might lead to the demise of this otherwise not unagreeable venue.