From public bar to cocktail bar: books for the discerning drinker

One of the joys of getting older is the appreciation of the solitary pint. But what to do as you sip your hard-earned beer? Usually after a suitable period of contemplation I’ll start fiddling with my phone. Not Adrian Tierney-Jones; he writes books, and his latest, A Pub for All Seasons (Headline, £20), is a poetic meditation on the public house, its history and place in our culture with some memoir deftly thrown in. Most of all it’s an appreciation of what makes a pub great: the layers accumulated by decades – centuries, sometimes – of human interaction. ‘The perfect pub,’ he writes, ‘is a kind of metaphysical palimpsest which we should try to imagine as a constantly evolving space.’ This is why it’s so sad when a new landlord comes in, strips away the clutter and replaces it with cushions that say ‘Love’ on them.

It’s from the public bar to the wine bar with Dan Keeling’s Who’s Afraid of Romanée-Conti? (Quadrille, £30). Keeling is one of the cleverest people in the wine trade; with his partner Mark Andrews, he managed to make the previously staid business of selling upmarket wine cool. Their little empire started with a low-circulation magazine called Noble Rot and now encompasses three restaurants, a shop and a wine merchants.

Annoyingly, Keeling writes well too, successfully conveying the often rarefied world of fine wine to the general reader. By the end of the book you really won’t be afraid of Romanée-Conti, should you ever come across a bottle – which is unlikely, as the wines are incredibly rare and expensive. Indeed, most of what Keeling writes about is out of my price range, so I eagerly turned to the section titled ‘You don’t have to be rich to cellar great wine’.