The wine list at RSJ

This review was first published in April 2001

The Thames and the Loire are contrasting rivers. One flows past graceful, white-stoned chateaux, troglodytic houses and six-acre caves full of secret mushroom fields; the other flows past palaces of spies, railway stations and tatty scoundrels' pubs. Nigel Wilkinson's RSJ restaurant, sited deep in the fur of Waterloo's underbelly, is the link between the two. This is where the wines of the Loire are drunk by Thamesiders.

And have been, now, for 21 years. I'm not quite sure by what notches restaurant success is professionally measured, but raw survival has to be a good thumb-rule. The drab site is, in fact, a clever one, servicing South Bank audiences as well as Waterloo and Southwark workers. The waiting staff are un-narcissistic, hard-working and efficient. It's not a beautiful restaurant (the room upstairs is a little too small and the room in the base-ment a little too big), but it's clean and bright and well looked-after. The kitchen (based on a recent meal ) is as good as it has ever been, and much better than it has sometimes been. And then, of course, there are the wines.

I can make two definitive state-ments about RSJ's wine list. The first is that it is the best specialist wine list in London: no one else imports, stocks and serves the wines of a single region with this knowledge, thoroughness and single-mindedness. Were Scotty to beam RSJ up and then down again in Nantes, Angers or Tours, it would still be among the best wine lists in town. We're lucky to have it in our midst, and I only wish someone would do the same for the Languedoc.

Secondly, RSJ's mark-ups are, by this over-expensive city's standards, eye-peelingly reasonable. You can drink some of the Loire valley's finest wines here for between £30 and £40, while much of the list (all worth drinking) is priced at under £20. It helps, of course, that the Loire is less fashionable than Bordeaux, Burgundy or the Rhone, but all credit to Wilkinson for proving that so many of his rivals are grasping profiteers. Mark-ups of triple retail and five times wholesale prices are not necessary in order to stay in business.

This list is so good, indeed, that it is an education. Ogereau, Papin, Alliet, Angeli, Eric Nicolas, Hu't, Cotat, Dageneau, Lebreton, Champalou: all the contemporary Loire greats are here. You can find out exactly what the latest trends are in the region at an RSJ table, as I discovered. Alas.

First, a little background. The key movement among the best French winegrowers today is what's called "non-interventionist" winemaking. In other words, you allow a wine to ferment, using wild yeasts, at as slow and dithering a pace as it pleases. You then let it stabilise naturally, and bottle it without fining and filtration. Such wines are nearly always made with fully ripe grapes (nervous growers pick under-ripe). The philosophy, one of pureness and naturalness, is entirely laudable. The slightly problematic result, however, is that wines from regions famed for dry whites end up containing some residual sugar. It's a particular problem in Alsace.

I sat down with two friends in RSJ, one of whom was a great enthusiast for Sancerre. We ordered Cotat's La Grande Cote (£32.95 plus 12.5 per cent service), this fine producer's best vineyard wine. Its glinting pale green colour enticed, it smelled of stones and smoke. It was, though, slightly sweet. As a green ideologue, I was entirely in favour; as a restaurant customer who wanted to drink dry white wine with good food, I was horrified.

Bof, as the French say, my education continues. We still drank the bottle, the first Sancerre in which I've ever found candied angelica and greengages, and then we drank the brilliant Claude Papin's 1995 Anjou Villages, Clos de Coulaine (£19.95 plus service): brisk, exuberant and spicy. The meal included one of the finest soups I've tasted for years (creamy butter bean and Italian parsley); impeccably seasoned, too, rather than crassly over-salty as is the restaurant norm. An intricate vegetarian assembly of rolled aubergine and sweet pepper "cannel-loni" with sautéed greens and lentil dahl was another highlight; roast rump of lamb in sea salt and thyme, baked bean casserole and aubergine and mint caviar was fortifyingly good, too. A three-course dinner for £16.95, combined with that brilliant and modestly priced wine list, explains everything. Long live the long-lived RSJ.

RSJ
33 Coin Street, SE1 9NR