Jersey Royals

There’s something quite quaint about calling something royal. It brings to mind a time when the monarchy wasn’t a bit of an embarrassment, and the most popular royal wasn’t a ten deck of fags at the corner shop. 

More than anything, the prefix royal takes me back to when the term was a source of pride; the days of the Empire, when we happily took what we wanted and named the best of what we found in honour of the Queen.

The story goes that in 1878 Hugh de la Haye, a Jersey potato farmer, spotted a couple of impressively large specimens on sale at a local shop. He took them home and then between some friends they divided one into 16 bits (it had an impressive 15 eyes) and planted them on a steep hill (cotil) overlooking the Bellanzoane valley. The following spring they found a large and early crop, not of big round potatoes like the parent, but of strange kidney shaped potatoes with a deep and pervasive nuttiness. The Jersey Royal fluke would go on to account for nearly half the island’s income. 

Another story: in 1649 Oliver Cromwell led the British invasion of Ireland. Three years later some 618,000 Irish were dead (nearly 40% of the pre war population) and Ireland had been parcelled up into estates for the new Protestant landed gentry. Cromwell didn’t bring potatoes to Ireland - they probably arrived around 1590 - but his 1652 Irish settlement left the peasant class with so little land, the potato was their saviour. One acre of land could yield twelve tonnes of potatoes which was more than enough to support a family of six and their domestic livestock. In 1845 potato blight came to Ireland, and the six years of famine that followed saw over a million more Irish die. 

While Cromwell certainly wasn’t royal, his invasion of Ireland saw the creation of the commonwealth, the blood drenched baby steps of the British Empire. The next 300 years of which would see the glory of the Empire spread far and wide. We presided over the great Bengal famine of 1770 where the British East India company saw their revenues drop to £174,300 (10 million Bengalis died as we carried on levying our grain taxes). We casually oversaw the genocide of Australia’s first people while destroying the continent’s fragile ecosystem, and we made untold millions from creation of the transatlantic slave trade. 

Also crossing the Atlantic was the potato; following their invasion of South America (another colonial genocide), Spanish conquistadors returned home with maize and potatoes. They had discovered them in Peru and Northern Bolivia where they were the staple food of the Inca and had been a mainstay of pre Hispanic agriculture down the Western spine of the continent. First landing in the Canary Islands around 1470, the potato, like Europe’s colonial ambitions spread greedily across the globe. 

Northern Europe in particular, fell hard for the potato’s starchy charms. It’s hard now to imagine our tables without French fries, roast potatoes, and the potato fondants of every other Masterchef offering. All showcase the potato’s unique synergy with the Maillard reaction, joyfully crisping up with oil and butter to turn nutty and creamy, frolicking happily with salt and frankly, bringing more joy to the table than any other root vegetable I can think of. 

We see the Maillard reaction in wine as well. It’s there in the toast on oak barrels, it’s there in the extended autolytic products of long lees ageing in Champagne, and it’s very definitely there in old school Meursault. Classically, the tasting notes for Meursault all talk about its butter and hazelnut characters; the rich valley floor wines taking on nuttiness from French oak and a rich buttery edge from the stirring of the yeast lees (battonage). In the days when Chardonnay was white Burgundy, the magic of the Burgundian cellar techniques was the pride of France. Meursault was the Queen of French wine. 

I see generational change as being the strongest driver for innovation in the world of wine. So often that change comes in waves, the nascent Californian wine industry discovered they could ripen Chardonnay to golden perfection. They could baste their wines in buttery malo lactic fermentation derived Diacety, they could buy the best French oak and tune the toast levels to add just the right level of hazelnut. Suddenly the uniqueness of Meursault was at risk. 

A new generation of growers would rise in Burgundy, ironically, inspired by early American wine importers like Frank Schoonmaker. They had begun to bottle their own wines and stop selling to negociants. The stage was set for Meursault to show off her better terroirs, wines from Perrières, Caillerets and Genevrières would thrill with their taut minerality. The hazelnut and butter of old gone as greater ripeness and fear of premature oxidation put paid to battonage. Lower levels of toast in barrels would relegate the old hazelnut character to a mere hint. The Queen of French wine had remade herself in a resolutely modern, terroir focused way.

She hasn’t completely forgotten her roots though, there’s still a creaminess to the wines that sings with the potato. The crenellated edge of a great roastie adding some of the toast missing in the wine, then perhaps a simply roasted chicken alongside. A pairing that would have graced the earliest of great French dining rooms, and one that is just as wonderful today.