We Talk Wine Bar Saturation, Underrated Regions and Brian Eno With Noble Rot’s Mark Andrew

When it launched in 2013, Noble Rot magazine quickly set an adventurous precedent for wine editorial. Based in London, founders Dan Keeling, who swapped a career in A&R to pursue his developing wine obsession, and Mark Andrew, now a Master of Wine, have carved out a publishing niche that felt equally informative and interesting, consistently approachable and always entertaining. This was content that wine lovers wanted.

Features on emerging regions, contributions from the food and wine industry’s leading voices, and interviews with Brian Eno, Keira Knightley and Fergus Henderson, to name a few, continue to set the tone, but the brand has since evolved tenfold.

Today, Keeling and Andrew run something of an empire: three Noble Rot wine bars across London featuring award-winning wine lists; two dynamic wine stores, Shrine to the Vine, cleverly stocked with delicious everyday drops alongside classic rarities; and an eponymous consulting and importing business that’s attracted some of the world’s best producers.

And yet, “We’ve always got more things in the pipeline,” Andrew tells Broadsheet at the team’s recent collaboration with Fitzroy wine bar Marion as part of Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.

How does Noble Rot make engaging with wine so approachable and enjoyable?
It’s very nice of you to say that; I’d never make such a bold claim myself! I guess we’ve always tried to never put wine on a pedestal, whether it was regarding perception or the vocabulary we use to describe it.

Wine used to be a closed-off space, with plenty of class-related gatekeepers, and Dan and I felt we had the confidence to add to the conversation in a different way. We didn’t feel there was anything that spoke to us in our own language. Noble Rot was really born out of the way we talk about wine.

Had wine media become too stuffy?
I don’t think wine media had become too stuffy; it was simply a reflection of how it’s always been. We decided to engage with it in a completely different way: different language, different terms, different vocab. Wine, of course, is a brilliantly complex product but a lot of people get bogged down in the facts and prescriptions of what’s been done before. That’s not our thing.

We love the hedonistic side of wine, its social side, and the fact it brings people together. It can be central to a great night out and this experiential side has become central to Noble Rot. Far more than any technical discussion, how it makes you feel should be central to the story.

You’ve struck a great balance between your in-depth wine articles and celebrity interviews. Has a particular celebrity’s interest in wine surprised you?
I think creative people – Brian Eno is a great example of this – lean towards having particular obsessions. Dan and I spent an evening drinking wine with him discussing scents and aromas, which happen to be an obsession of his. He has a whole room of these vials of different smells and it was just so cool. If you think about it, it’s not a big leap to consider that someone particularly artistic like this could translate their interests and excitements into wine.

Since you started the magazine and launched your venues, there’s been a growing market for interesting wine bars, but the output is homogenising, especially here in Australia. Do you worry it might become oversaturated?
Well, it doesn’t have any impact on us because we put our wine lists together by considering how we view the world of wine. I think that’s the same for high-quality operators who put their own sensibilities and ethos into their venues; there’s so much diversity in the world of wine that if you want to put your own particular spin on the theme, you can. But I do hear what you’re saying, and I don’t think it’s a new phenomenon.

Before Dan and I opened our first venue, we went to Paris around 2015 for research and visited the best wine bars. It was the heyday of the natural wine movement but everywhere offered the same thing and had similar lists. We noticed that all of these places stocked the same, albeit exciting, producers like Foillard, Ganevat and Puzelat. This just seemed to be a natural consequence of the zeitgeist. It’s always been this way. When this happens, there’s an opportunity for operators and sommeliers to identify the trend and offer more.

Let’s discuss your love of unsung grape varieties and wine styles.
Spain is probably the most exciting wine country in the world at the moment. The resurgence of garnacha by producers like Comando G in Gredos or Mencia in Ribeira Sacra is really exciting. Then there’s the Canary Islands or the non-fortified wines being made in Jerez. We could really go on and on with Spain at the moment.

What’s next for you and Noble Rot?
There will be something else. For the moment we’re bedding in what we’ve just done – we opened Noble Rot Mayfair in 2023 and our second retail store, Shrine to the Vine, just opened last November – and then we’ll move forward from there.