I came across Beck Ink while eating at Unwined, a wine bar and restaurant near Waterloo in London. It comes from Judith Beck in Austria, close to Lake Neusiedl in the east of the country, where she works organically and biodynamically, with a low-intervention approach to winemaking.
Beck Ink is a blend of Zweigelt and St. Laurent grapes. Despite the “Ink” name and its deep colour, this isn’t intended to be a massive or heavily extracted red. This is the 2023 vintage, at 12% ABV.
There is a deep cherry, cinnamon and clove on the aroma. It tastes wonderfully juicy, dry and smooth, with soft tannins and a really deep sour cherry character. That’s not to say the wine itself is sour, far from it. It has a lovely mouthfeel, with plenty of fruit and a spicy finish.
I’d actually chosen this wine to go with my steak. There was just one problem, it was so nice that it didn’t last until the steak arrived. I then tried Slobodné Rebela Rosa from Slovakia, which I thought worked better on its own than it did with food. I also tried a Quady “Starboard Batch 88”, a port-style wine from California that went well with the dark chocolate tart dessert.
The Beck Ink is somewhere between £9 and £11 a glass. I didn’t write down the exact price, and it wasn’t on Unwined’s usual wines-by-the-glass list as it was being offered as a “special”. You can pick up a bottle at retail for around £15. It’s imported by Les Caves de Pyrène, who also ran the Real Wine Fair I went to in 2024.
As you can probably tell from the wines I tried, Unwined has an excellent wine list. It’s different rather than typical, and that extends to the wines available by the glass, which were all between £7 and £12. It’s the sort of list that makes you want to try something you’ve never come across before, which is exactly how I ended up discovering Beck Ink. My only small gripe is that you only seem to get the larger, more appropriate, wine glass size, if you order a bottle, rather than a glass, of wine.
