‘Diners are usually asked to engage in some mind-warping wine challenges’

It’s all fine wine, fine dining and fine art for William

It’s an error I’ve come across before: an inedible foodstuff used to decorate or hold a piece of food on the plate, but which ends up in your gob.

It happened in London once when some dried lentils, holding aloft an edible cone of trout tartare and crème fraîche, passed my lips. The same thing happened here at the otherwise impeccable Vineyard at Stockcross, a very fine hotel and restaurant near Newbury in Berkshire.

Small, dried grains had been used as a pillow to hold a canapé which then found themselves stuck to the amuse-bouche and then in my mouth. Politely, I spat them out.

If it had been my late, great heroic luncher of a father, they’d have been swallowed. Entering the hall of a flat I lived in in London, ever peckish, he spotted a bowl of pot pourri and shoved a handful into his mouth. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Oh,’ he spluttered, ‘I thought they were a bowl of those trendy new vegetable crisps.’ I think he swallowed them anyway.

Back in the present and I ordered a bottle of Austrian Grüner Veltliner from the wonderful Domaine Ott, Fass 4 2017, to steady my nerves. Which indeed it did, as it’s a beautiful wine and one of the many thousands of bottles that The Vineyard stocks in its famous cellars.

Perhaps the best-known vintages are Californian, which are celebrated in a wonderful mural depicting the day in May 1976 when the late British wine merchant Steven Spurrier held a blind wine tasting in Paris. California wines were pitted against those of France and, to their horror and disbelief, the French lost. The mural, in a room of the hotel lobby, depicts

in vast, lavish, canvas splendour the event that rocked the wine establishment of the mid-1970s. It’s worth a visit just to see the painting.

Reflecting this, diners are usually asked to engage in some mind-warping wine challenges. So our dinner began with the arrival of two black glasses of wine. ‘Tell me what you think it is,’ said the sommelier. I thought it tasted of cheese and was a white – so, trying to be clever, said it was a red. It turned out to be a white, but it was a natural wine and they do indeed pong.

This entertainment over, we tucked into some delicate starters; mine a creamy burrata with neat strips of leek, tufts of salad and some hazelnuts. The leeks, well-enoughcooked pointy-nosed strips, were a feat of ingenuity; I don’t know how you make a leek edible without cooking it to mush for about 30 minutes. The nuts were a gorgeous addition of toasty crunch. Emily, meanwhile, was enjoying a painterly presentation of peas, pecorino and black truffle. The pecorino came in a little parcel of pastry, a flock of al dente peas nudged up against it flecked with little, purple, edible flowers.

Main courses were as precise. My lemon sole was beautifully cooked and came with mussels, three of which were in a crunchy breadcrumb croquette. Emily’s rib eye was similarly on point; charred and as rare as she dreams of.

We sat in an intimate corner of the upper part of this comfortable room (all creamy walls and drapes, with a large swirling staircase that leads down to dining on a lower level), very well looked after and with too much eaten to manage pudding.

It’s a special place, for special occasions. It would be even better with no pebbles or pot pourri in your mouth.