The bar that sparked a revolution: Sager + Wilde

It’s 10 years since Sager + Wilde swung open its doors on Hackney Road, officially making fine wine cool by bringing it to East London – and at affordable prices. I sat down with Michael Sager to talk about the bar and its pivotal place in London’s wine scene

Swiss-born, Michael Sager’s accent is a mongrel – an East End twang mingling with its soft-yet-strict Franco-German roots. The 40-year-old’s stony, blue-grey eyes stand out starkly against his olive skin and dark hair. There’s a continental edge to his attire – with an effortless immaculate-casual, while tattoos snake out from under his shirt sleeves. He – like the wine bar he created – is a study in opposites.

Sager + Wilde revolutionised London’s wine scene, bringining fine wine to the edgy East and making it cool in the process. But, as Sager says, “[Fine wine] was always cool for me.” Today the establishment holds its place in London’s wine scene, but has lost its place in the upper echelons of wine bars. It would be dismissed by “the extremely natty, the radicals, the zero-zero crowd” (as Sager describes them) for offering more classical wine, such as back-vintage Barolo; but they have gotten away with being “edgy enough. The list is clearly more natural-leaning than it once was – and there’s a reason for that.

Sager’s latest venture, Equal Parts

“Flirting with faults or defects is super interesting,” Sager tells me. “Flying that close to the sun; perfection is there, for me.” In one breath, he talks about being a “junky” for tasting from barrel, compares natural wine to vinyl (“It just gives you a different feeling.”), how volatile acidity makes wines “digeste”. “I could make a wine to taste like DRC, all things being equal; because it’s a recipe,” he says. “I cannot make a wine like …. Chante Rêves, Prieuré Roch…” The likes of Coche and Ravenau are, to him, “extremely framed”.

 But, in the next breath, he is vehemently anti the natural wine scene and its “bros”: “There’s a lack of understanding about what they’re doing,” Sager says. For him, organic farming is the thread at the core of natural wine; he’s ok with filtering and machine-harvesting when at large volumes, but points to how wines like ChinChin (the primary-coloured, omnipresent Vinho Verde) is promoted as a natural wine – when it is anything but. While someone like Pacalet is using zero sulphur, yet with systemically farmed fruit. 

“It sells because the labels are cool, it sells because the story-telling is a bit more engaging, maybe,” Sager says of natural wine – his problem is that it’s become a lifestyle, and yet it’s clearly one that, in some ways, he identifies with.

Read more about Sager + Wilde, its place in London’s wine scene and how Sager’s empire has grown in my feature for Club Oenologique