A treasury of burgundy in the Wye Valley

If a wine doesn’t speak to Tom Innes, he won’t sell it – apart from one pinot grigio…

Tom Innes is telling me about an electric blue suit that his motherin-law banned him from wearing to his wedding. “I inherited it from my godfather; it made me look like a bookie.”

Other topics of conversation as we roar down the M4 in a dirty white van, include wine markups in restaurants: “If it’s a really interesting bottle, I don’t begrudge them the gigantic mark-up, but they have to have done the work.” Also, the days when he used to run a food shop and parmesan was so exotic he had to travel from Wales to Soho to buy whole wheels of it from an Italian deli. That food shop, which he opened in the Eighties as a means of escaping from London, has metamorphosed into the idiosyncratic but excellent wine merchant FingalRock, located on Monnow Street in Monmouth.

I happened upon Fingal-Rock after speaking at a wine dinner at the Gurnard’s Head in Cornwall last year (side note: the wine list there truly is a work of art – the result of intensive labour). One of the wines at that dinner was Domaine de Rycke Jasnières, a chenin blanc from the Loire. I loved its beautiful clarity and subtle flavours and wanted to recommend it in this column. FingalRock was the importer but I couldn’t find Domaine de Rycke on the website, so I emailed Innes, presuming this was an administrative oversight.

It wasn’t. “I have 98 bottles,” replied Innes with what I now know is characteristic pert precision, “Sadly, Mme de Rycke has given up her vineyard in the Loire (protracted divorce), so that is all there is. I have been husbanding it, not allowing it to be wasted on customers that might not appreciate it.” Obviously I had to go and see him.

Monmouth on one of the earliest, dankest days in January, is not particularly welcoming, but it was more appealing on the day that Innes first visited. A Londoner, born and bred, he had qualified and practised for a year or two as a barrister but “always had a yen to move out to the country”. He looked for chambers outside London, “but that didn’t work”. “Retraining as a solicitor seemed a bit laborious,” he says. His mother had been a caterer,

“so I was brought up knee-deep in saucepans full of marmalade… always interested in food.” He set up a deli in Monmouth and over the years, the wine side of the business stealthily grew. “I always liked wine. I did 15 years of homework – read and drank. In 2003, I took the plunge and changed it over to wine.”

Well, almost changed it over. There are still about a dozen food items ranged unexpectedly around the space – a jar of anchovies here, a bit of pasta there.

We go upstairs, squeezing past even more dusty piles of stuff than there are on the stairs in my flat, and settle in the kitchen, where Innes’s wife, literary agent Broo Doherty, is working. Surrounded by a clutter of jars of Wye Valley honey, assorted empty bottles and two BT 1997 London telephone directories, we taste.

Innes buys wine from other shippers but also imports directly from producers he has sniffed out himself, most of them French. He specialises in burgundy – “Everyone catches their breath – ‘Oooh, burgundy is expensive’ – but I concentrate on finding wines that are closely related to or neighbouring more famous things and I have good wines that aren’t too much.” We taste a Domaine Thevenot-Le-Brun Bourgogne Hautes Cotes de Nuits 2016 (13%, Fingal-Rock, £14.50), made from 80 per cent pinot blanc and 20 per cent chardonnay and it is lovely, gently creamy, with a sense of place rather than grape. And a Domaine des Croix Quincy 2018 (13%, Fingal-Rock, £13.50) that has gleaming transparency without shouting any fruit flavours at you – it makes me think of a sheet of wax paper with green leaves, herbs, elderflower and grass pressed into it. We don’t taste anything I don’t rate, which is unusual.

I learn, by tasting and talking, that Innes likes wines that express both grape variety and terroir, that have a hinterland. If he doesn’t like a wine, he won’t sell it. “It has to speak to me, or I’m not doing it. Actually that’s not quite true. I have a pinot grigio. I’m ashamed of it. I don’t put it in the shop. But if people want it, they can buy it from me. Rather depressingly, people say, ‘Have you got a nice pinot?’

And they don’t mean noir.”

What does he think of English wines? “Oh dear,” says Doherty, stifling a smile and looking at the floor. “Too expensive,” is the short and polite version of the Innes response. And woe betide any white that a critic like me describes as “melony”,

“I’ve learnt that it’s code for something I don’t like,” he says. Fingal-Rock has won plenty of awards. It is run by a man who cares in a way that now seems old-fashioned. I recommend placing an order – just don’t expect to be able to go online, click and buy. The website still lists a fax number. If you are interested, get in touch via the website (pinotnoir.co. uk). You can be assured of a wry response – and good wines.

‘I’ve learnt that “melony” is code for something I don’t like’

The answers to my new year wine quiz are all (A) except 4 and 7, which are both (C). The winner is Margaret Ellis; the two runners-up are Sasha Turnbull and Darren Spevick.