Plaster Private Eye samples Saatchi Yates’ Wine

Call me a drunk but the idea of spending a single dry night at a gallery gives me the shakes. Call me anything you like, in fact. I won’t hear you over the incessant din of inane art chatter. I’ll laugh, I’ll look down into my full glass, I’ll tell you that I need another drink and I’ll escape to the bar. And while I stand alone I’ll drink with a stern intensity that signals to desperate acquaintances not to approach. And when I settle among a group of true friends our conversation will be lively, witty, and enlightened thanks to our measured consumption of the noble drink.

Drink eases the experience of gallery hopping. The gift of a drink is an ancient guest right. Galleries may not offer us a place at the hearth, but they can at least offer us a skinful. After all, that stranger at the door might be a new collector. But when the free drinks flow it can be hard to remember that galleries aren’t providing them out of the goodness of their hearts. We are deer at the riverbank and they are lowering our defences. By the night of a private view, the majority of the works will have been sold via PDF, but there will always be a few limp, reckless stragglers ready to be picked off.

Recently, I was at a private view at Saatchi Yates’ new-ish space on Bury Street. I was there to see the American artist Will St. John’s exuberant, rococo-inspired, generative AI-inflected paintings of tchotchkes and New York scenesters. How very contemporary. However, my visit had a second purpose. The previous day, my editor had called me into his office and told me what he thought of the art and asked me to instead review the gallery’s new, in-house wine; grown, pressed and bottled in Tuscany by Fattoria Lavacchio, bought, branded and served in London by Saatchi Yates.

By the time I’d arrived, the party was in full-swing and the crowd of fashionable art kids had spilled onto the street. Outside; £20 shirts and £2,000 tabis, sunkissed from Marseille, cigarettes waving, the simmering tension between summer affairs and autumn breakdowns. Inside, a small audience gathered around Phoebe Saatchi, while Arthur Yates cut about the room in his black, slicked-back hair and black double breasted suit.

I was pretty thirsty, so after I passed the threshold I went straight to the bar. They might have been showing off about the wine, but there was no ceremony to its serving, just screw top bottles being thrown about by the bar staff who were filling rows upon rows of glasses as quickly as possible. I started off with the Gallery White, a 2022 Toscana Bianco. I took a photo of the bottle, took a glass, tilted it back and took a slurp. I texted my editor. “Bad news. The wine’s good.”

This is the only time I’ll write this: I have to hand it to Saatchi Yates. No, scratch that: I have to hand it to Fattoria Lavacchio. The white was clear, cool, and clean. Not too acidic and not too thin. It brought to mind flat peaches and vogues. The red was a 2022 Chianti. Young for a Chianti and quite purple with a fairly fruity flavour to match, mainly cherry and blackcurrant, and, at the end, just a hint of acidity. Thankfully, it wasn’t too tannic and it wasn’t too boozy. It was just… fine.

I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just the drink going to my head, so I asked around. A group of fashion students all agreed it was the best wine they’d had at a gallery opening. One curator complimented the refills: “Three times in an hour. It’s fucking amazing, you don’t get that anywhere.” One waiter confirmed this: “Lots of refills, lots of bottles, we’re running out of places to put the empties.”

Conspicuous self-branding has a bad reputation; like a monogrammed shirt it suggests vulgarity and insecurity. But so what? If the shirt fits, wear it. Fattoria Lavacchio is a real vineyard, really in the Chianti Rufina region, and Saatchi Yates served up a perfectly passable wine. So, 700 words, invoice enclosed?

Well, no, actually, I’m not done yet. I think Saatchi Yates made a fatal error. Here’s my theory: galleries shouldn’t serve drinks that outshine the art. The reason art is made and collected is to satisfy a certain sense of emptiness. If you fill that with alcohol, then what’s left? At Saatchi Yates, everyone I spoke to had good words for the wine and – here’s the problem – they didn’t for the art.

Around half an hour before the doors closed, my new friends, the fashion students, started complaining that the wine had got worse. Maybe it wasn’t so good after all? I stopped another waiter and he confirmed the worst – we’d drunk the bar dry and were now onto the backup bottles. So, that was it. The wine was a hit. The art was another matter.