Nobody's perfect
New MA wine columnist Fiona Sims takes a look at the Nobody Inn's superb offer Somebody asked me the other day which pubI thought had the best wine list. The Nobody Inn, I replied, without thinking. The Devon pub has won more wine awards than you can shake a stick at, and boasts one of the biggest lists in the country I'm talking 800 different wines, and dozens by the glass. Okay, so big is not always best there are plenty of show-off lists around with all the big names but not much originality. And this is a pub, after all (and it is still very much a pub, as beer equals wine sales here), so I'm not suggesting for one minute that you attempt anything on this scale. But the wine antics at the Nobody Inn have brought proprietor Nick Borst-Smith more column inches than Paul Burrell's revelations, not to mention the kind of customer numbers that many of you dream about. A fair few of those customers are from the wine trade itself. It's become the obligatory stop-offen route to deepest Devon and Cornwall no matter that it's a good half-hour drive from theM5, negotiating the narrow,towering hedgerowed lanes to Doddiscombsleigh, on the Dartmoor outskirts. It's not only the staggering choice on the list people come for Uruguayan Tannat, anyone? but for Borst-Smith's prices. He famously marks up his wines modestly you can buy Cloudy Bay (cult New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc) here for £16 a bottle when it can be three times that elsewhere. And the higher up the list you go (read more expensive), the lower the mark-ups: Borst-Smith reckons it encourages his customers to trade up. So what brought on this vinous philanthropy? "It was 1970. I was working in hotels when I spotted the pub for sale, so I bought it, inheriting its whisky collection. "That's what got me intowine all those smells and tastes. I upgraded from Blue Nun to Hirondelle, and then I started to discover other wines. I got so excited about it, I thought I should share it with my customers, so I started putting different wines on the bar for them to try." A technique he still employs today, by the way. Burgundy was Borst-Smith's first love, then Aussie wines started to hit our shores. "That's when the public started to get interested," he remembers. And he hasn't looked back. His list now skirts the globe, searching out ever more unusual wines the quality in the bottle at the top of his list. "I rarely look at wines under £2.50 ex-VAT. If you think how much is taken up with distribution and production costs, not to mention tax and duty, the wine itself won't be up to much," he says. His latest love is Monterei, a new-ish wine region in north west Spain. "I just got back and my notebook is full," he grins. And no-one can beat Argentina for value for money, he says. "It's a better bet than Chile at the moment, there's many more styles and more variety." He has 30 wines from Argentina on his list. "But you can offer an interesting list with just 12 wines as long as they are all available by the glass," he advises. "The important thing is to offer a balance. You don't want wines at all the same price point there needs to be some variation." Consider hooking up with your local merchant who can keep stocks for you, suggests Borst-Smith. "And change the list from time to time, making sure you get the vintages right, and include where the wine comes from and who produces it." Stock control is Borst-Smith's biggest issue well, it would be with 800 different wines to shift. "Yes we did trim it back to 600, but it's crept up again. I just keep finding new wines it's like discovering America," he giggles. But he (or rather his accountant) came up with a solution a few years back selling the wine off-premises. Now it's a thriving business, and one, interestingly, that a growing number of restaurants and pubs (Wetherspoon is the latest) are getting into. In fact, Borst-Smith's proudest moment was winning both South West Wine Merchant of the Year, along with Small Wine Merchant of the Year, at the International Wine Challenge Awards in the mid-'90s. It's some pub, I tell you.
