Diary of a Shopkeeper, 31st January

In my previous Diary I told the story of a butcher asking me and my dad to test taste half a dozen different haggis recipe. I suppose it was my first encounter with the food industry as anything but a carefree consumer. (Well, I was only 10.)

However, something about that happy half hour of tasting must have stuck in my mind. To this day I am great believer in comparative tasting. There’s no use sipping just one Malbec, for instance, and trying to decide if its any good or not. You have to line up three or four and taste them one after the other. And take notes as you’re going along. That way you learn by comparison: one wine will be sweeter, one more acidic; one will be smoother, one more tannic. Hopefully, one will stand out as possessing all those qualities in perfect balance. That is the bottle I will choose to stock in the shop.

It’s the luxury of the wine trade professional to visit importers’ portfolio tastings and producers’ cellars, where such comparisons are laid on for you. Back home, it wouldn’t be affordable to open four similar bottles on a Saturday night, just to assess the slight differences between them. However, we can all approximate the experience by keeping a brief record in a notepad or on a phone of the wines we drink. Even if it’s just one bottle a week, that adds up to over 50 a year. And even if we just write, ‘Chateau Gaucho, Malbec, £10.99. Smooth and powerful, good value,’ then over the months we will build up a library of information to help us make buying choices in future. A photo of the label is a great aid to memory.

That’s the approach I took when I started to become interested in wine about 20 years ago – 25 years after I became interested in haggis!

John Macsween started off as a family butcher in Bruntsfield. It was there that his haggis began to gain fame. If he’d been away on a trip and returned via Waverley Station, he would hail a taxi and pretend to be a tourist: ‘Take me to wherever they sell the best haggis,’ he would tell the driver. If the taxi dropped him off at Macsween’s – and they usually did – the driver would receive an extra-large tip.

At one point Jo and the Macsween family asked me to organise a comparative tasting in Edinburgh to find the best wine to match haggis. Andrew Fulton from the Orkney Brewery was there to handle the beer side of things, and someone from the Malt Whisky Society deliberated over that more traditional accompaniment.

I poured two or three whites, in case there were any dedicated white drinkers. None was ideal with the meaty haggis, but a spicy Gewürztraminer went well with the veggie version. Red was the obvious choice for the traditional haggis, but the full-bodied reds – like Argentinian Malbec and Australian Shiraz – weren’t necessarily the best match. Although haggis has strong meat and spice flavours, it has a soft texture requiring little chewing. Neither does the mashed tatties or clapshot that accompanies it. The biggest wines tended to overwhelm the food.

Which means that a medium-bodied, low-to-medium-tannin red is perfect. Ideally it should have noticeably acidity to cut through the essential greasiness of the haggis. Red meats like steak and roast beef have flavours in the same zone as haggis, but their texture is quite different, requiring chewing. This means their flavours linger longer in the mouth, so a red wine with more palate-refreshing tannin is ideal. Also, red meat tends to be far less greasy that haggis or other sausage-type preparations, so acidity – while not a bad thing – is not essential.

By the time the Macsween family and their foodie guests had tasted up and down the table that day, the winner of the Grand Haggis Matching Contest was found to be a Barbera from northwest Italy. Every so often I revisit that match, and still find the results of that comparative tasting to be convincing. And delicious. So, cheers and salute to our national dish and Italian red wine!

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 2nd February. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.