Before he was a wine writer, Dan Keeling signed Coldplay. He was Head of A&R at Parlophone Records, then Managing Director of Island Records, overseeing a roster that included Amy Winehouse and Bombay Bicycle Club. But by 2012 the music industry had chewed him up, and he found himself at loose ends — buying bottles at a wine shop near his old office, where he kept running into a sardonic Master of Wine named Mark Andrew. They shared a sense of humor and a conviction that wine writing was insufferably pompous. So they sat down at Mark's old computer and made a fanzine.
Noble Rot launched in February 2013, named after Botrytis cinerea, the grey fungus that concentrates sugars in certain grapes and produces some of the world's greatest sweet wines. The magazine mixed rigorous wine knowledge with the irreverent energy of a music zine — interviewing LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy about his cellar, getting Keira Knightley to write a column, printing David Shrigley illustrations alongside tasting notes. Brian Eno said it brought originality, humor, and space travel to the serious business of drinking wine. Caitlin Moran said the founders described wines as if they were future friends or rock stars coming to blow your mind.
Then things escalated. In 2015, Keeling and Andrew opened a restaurant in an 18th-century townhouse on Lamb's Conduit Street in Bloomsbury — a building that had been, at various points, a bootmaker's shop, a surgery, and an electrical store, and was first converted into a wine bar by a descendant of Admiral Nelson in 1974. The wine list won the National Restaurant Awards' Wine List of the Year an unprecedented five times. A second restaurant followed in the former Gay Hussar on Greek Street in Soho — the legendary Hungarian eatery where the plot to overthrow Margaret Thatcher was reportedly hatched. A third opened in Mayfair's Shepherd Market.
Their mission, as Keeling once put it, is to de-twattify wine. The magazine — which still publishes three times a year, with columnists including Marina O'Loughlin and Simon Hopkinson — remains the beating heart of the whole operation: proof that if you talk about wine the way you talk about football or films, people will actually listen.
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