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Vintage dining

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Jonathan Ray picks out ten of the best wine lists in town

The Chancellor is such a fool. If anything is going to drive us to drink it’s the soaring cost of wine, beer and spirits. Are these muddle-headed puritans going to tax or prohibit every single one of our simple pleasures? There will soon be some diktat on dining out.

Restaurateurs are notoriously grasping when it comes to mark-ups on wine, although there are honourable exceptions. I just wish more sold wine by the glass; not so I can drink less, but so I can drink more, enjoying a greater variety of tastes while also making the Chancellor even richer.

London is blessed with great restaurants, with the likes of Pétrus, Le Gavroche, The Square and Chez Bruce rightly famous for their wine lists. Here is my current top ten.

Roussillon, 16 St Barnabas Street, London SW1, tel: 020 7730 5550

Tucked away in a Pimlico backstreet is this gem, where chef-patron Alexis Gauthier and head chef Gerard Virolle wield mean skillets indeed and sommelier Robert Della Pietra oversees a brilliantly sourced — if a trifle expensive — wine list. Naturally, the wines of Languedoc, Roussillon and the Rhône are well represented, but so too are less well-known regions: look out for the 2003 Domaine de Torraccia, a belter of a red from Corsica for £36.

Clos Maggiore, 33 King Street, London WC2, tel: 020 7379 9696

The wine list stretches for 89 pages, encompassing 2,500 different wines ranging from £18 a bottle to £3,900. Sommelier David Galetti knows his stuff and is proud to offer 50 wines under £20 a bottle and 30 by the glass. ‘We don’t want to scare people,’ he says. ‘We want them to have a great time and to keep coming back.’ Well, he doesn’t scare me and I do keep going back. Last time I stuck to wines by the glass — an Albariño from Spain, a Pinot Noir from New Zealand, a Zinfandel and a dessert Black Muscat, both from California.

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