Hotel du Vin, Cambridge

The ostensible reasons for my trip to Cambridge were to visit my little sister (who’s reading hockey and playing geography at John’s), and to return my boyfriend to the bosom of his former alma mater, but truthfully I was there because I wanted to check out Cambridge’s hottest new hotel offering: Hotel du Vin (HdV).

HdV is, I think, one of the few hotel groups that can legitimately label its brand ‘boutique’. The point about soi-disant ‘lifestyle’ hotels is that they are supposed to be idiosyncratic and quirky, and those qualities ill-accord with the homogeneity that is either striven for, or is an automatic by-product of, large hotel chains. Despite the fact that HdV has been subsumed by MWB (an enormous company that also owns the rapidly multiplying Malmaison empire), the Cambridge offering - one of the most recent additions to the Hotel du Vin stable – does much to assuage fears that HdV might be tempted to tinker with its product now that it is part of a greater whole. 

The hotel is located in a Grade II-listed former university building on Trumpington Street, equidistant from the treasures of the Fitzwilliam Museum and the splendour of King’s Parade, and contains a delightful admixture of period charms and thoroughly 21st-century comforts. The decor is almost wholly home-grown; the walls are lined with snaps of students revelling at May Balls past (indeed, my boyfriend recognised some of the subject matter photographed, much to his amusement), and the labyrinthine underground bar contains cosy offshoot ‘snugs’ that are each designated a Cambridge college: Trinity, Pembroke, King’s, and St John’s. The nooks are appropriately themed, containing books, artefacts and wall-prints to match their respective moniker.  Smokers and smirters alike will appreciate the heated outdoor “cigar shack”, where they can indulge in a post-prandial cigar from Cuba (or Nicaragua if they prefer).

To a large extent, this individualism and indigeneity is a direct by-product of the organisational structure of HdV; each manager is delegated power to run his respective hotel as he sees fit. In Cambridge, Denis Frucot is exercising this autonomy with aplomb.

One feature shared by the 15 hotels in the HdV group is the wine label assignation of the bedrooms. Historically this taxonomy derived from vintners’ sponsorship of the rooms when the hotel group was in its infancy. Nowadays the brand ties are looser, but the novel system of nomenclature endures. Each suite is uniquely sumptuous. Ours (Wolf Blass) was equipped with a sprawling 8 foot square bed (long and wide enough to accommodate my 6’6 companion; no mean feat), and – joy-of-joys – a brace of adjacent free-standing baths. Another (Brown Brothers) has its own private cellar cinema and patio terrace, and Gaudium (originally a basement kitchen) contains an old cast iron bread oven and an open well, which has been floodlit for dramatic effect and covered with thick Perspex for safety! The 38 remaining rooms and suites all contain custom-made beds replete with luxurious Egyptian cotton, Bose entertainment systems and walk-through monsoon showers or roll-top baths, with generous helpings of Arran Aromatics unguents.

The hotel's layout gets some getting used to, and navigating the maze of corridors would, we imagine, prove a feat after an evening in the bar. Or when sober. When we leave Wolf Blass to look for the library - a room that looks as if John Galliano has slipped rohypnol into an eccentric old don's hot chocolate, then gone to work on his study - we find ourselves bemusedly standing back outside our front door moments later.

We eventually wend our way down to the restaurant, where we put ourselves in the hands of one of the hotel's four sommeliers at dinner. As in all Hotel du Vin properties, wine is an essential part of the experience. There’s a cellar containing a huge selection of Old and New World varieties, a purpose-built wine-tasting room, and a separate dining space for themed evenings during which specially selected wines are brought to life by an expert host. I'll come clean - my understanding of wine is pretty limited, given the fact that any self-edificatory efforts, in wine-tastings and the like, have ended in inebriation and knowledge loss. But with 550 bottles in the cellar beneath, it's reassuring to know I have an expert to guide me, and sure enough the sommelier skilfully teams my black pudding and venison haunch with a fantastically fruity, punchy Pomerol. The boyfriend is equally pleased with his salad draped in mellow molten goats cheese and red pepper speckled gorgonzola gnocchi. The one complaint that he had, in fact, was about the pudding. I hedge my bets by selecting the assiette - an assortment of all the other puddings on the menu, bar the plum and hazelnut crumble, which my boyfriend ordered. Crumble, however, it was not, according to my discerning boyfriend. To be fair, it was more of a tart than a crumble, but the only appropriate name that we could think of to christen it was a grumble, because that was the only thing that my boyfriend ended up having for pudding, so indignant was he about the misadvertisement.

Fortunately breakfast next morning is flawless (despite an initial, inexplicable reluctance to bring eggs Florentine instead of eggs Benedict), and we are both sad to leave. The sense of disappointment is massively exacerbated upon our return to a particularly petite-seeming bed clad in linen of indeterminate ethnicity, and a lonely-looking solo bath. You really know you’ve been spoilt rotten when one bath-tub just isn’t enough.