No Argie-bargy with this wine

This review was first published in July 2001

Listen up, would- be authors. I've got a great book subject for you. It's a wine-and-food theme, but it's got nothing to do with tedious questions about what is meant to go with what. You'll need a bit of scholarship and a bit of history, but nothing gives the true author more pleasure than acquiring those. More details below, after a quick anecdote to explain what three of us were doing getting stuck into steaks down in the darkness of the Gaucho Grill on Swallow Street during one of the hottest and sunniest lunchtimes yet this summer.

It was the memory of my first meal in Argentina which did it. The restaurant was near the River Plate and directly under the flight path of planes piling into Buenos Aires's domestic airport. Mounds of dismembered animals greeted us as we entered; a kilo of meat per person seemed to be about right. The steak on my plate was so large and so soft that it swayed gently before I laid my knife on it, tiny tears of blood welling to the surface between the seared lines left by the grill-iron. This was steak with the texture of wild salmon; it tasted of clotted cream mixed with blood. Few meals have left such an impression on me. Since my colleague Steve Pryer had recently made a research visit to Argentina to catch up with the latest on the wine scene there, I thought I would tap his knowledge at the same time as putting one of London's Gauchos to the test. Standard photographer Danny Elwes came along to help stow away more food and more wine.

We had starters, of course, too: a fine steak tartare, crisp empanadas and humita de choclo - a pretty little maize-leaf parcel of sweet ground corn. Then it was on to the main business: one of each of the three finest steaks, combined with a serious charge at the wine list. Bife de chorizo (sirloin), our helpful Australian waitress told us, was seven per cent fat; bife de lomo (fillet) was four per cent; and bife ancho (rib-eye) was 12 per cent. They were all shipped at 1C (never frozen) from Argentina - and were tender and flavoury, though not quite up to the standard of my gaucho revelation of a few years back. (Better cutlery would help; even a first-class fillet needs a serrated steak knife, while for something like a rib-eye it is essential. We had to attack this rare flesh with blunt instruments.) The chips were finger-sized; whole roasted heads of garlic, meanwhile, kept our arteries clean and ensured a little personal space in the Tube afterwards.

And the wine? Champagne aside, this, I am happy to say, is an all-Argentine list. We had a few glasses of white, just to show willing; the Libertad Pinot Blanc was the most interesting, with its scent of rose geraniums and weighty, chewy flavour (£4.50 a glass; service is genuinely at your discretion). Reds, though, are the thing. On Steve's advice we went for a comparative bottle each of the 1998 Alta Vista Malbec (£25.50, made by the late Jean-Michel Arcaute, the man who powered Chateau Clinet into the Bordeaux firmament, drowned in a boat accident this June), and the 1998 Norton Reserva Malbec (£29.50). Both were dense and packed with savoury plum power, the Alta Vista being the wilder of the two, while the Norton was more sweetly oaky. There are 40 others to chose from on the list, and none more expensive than £35. This makes it, in my view, one of the best places in London to drink inexpensive, food-friendly, richly flavoured red wine. If you want to push the boat out, there is even a special list of rare and vintage wines whose prices rise to £160. Alas, on the day we called they were all missing, largely because of someone else's failure to push the boat out; they were stuck on a quayside somewhere in Argentina. Good job it's winter down there.

It can't be an accident, anyway, that the southern hemisphere's finest range of meat-friendly reds has developed within the context of a carnivore culture of ferocious single-mindedness. Hence the unwritten book I mentioned. It would explore the relationship between a nation or a region's food culture and the wines which have evolved in response to that. Muscadet and Picpoul de Pinet, for example, in oyster-raising areas; Bordeaux and Rioja where ovens beckon lambs; while Argentina fends off Australia and California for the greatest steak wines in the world. Get writing.

Wine list scores 4 out of 5.