Wine lists give me the fear. I can still recall the prickle of adrenaline when my father handed me the leather-bound menu when I was in my early twenties because I had started working for a wine merchant after university. Should I play it safe or take a punt on something unusual that some people might hate? Perhaps it would be safest to pick the second cheapest. Their drinking pleasure was in my hands. Argh, the pressure.
You’d think that after 15 years of writing professionally about wine this anxiety would have faded. It actually gets worse. The more I know, the more indecisive I become. Is the wine a bit too young? Was it a good vintage? Meanwhile the rest of the table is getting thirsty.
One can ask the staff but in many places they’re just as clueless, if not more so. At a steak place in Belgravia that’s popular with Nigel Farage – you can probably guess the one – the waiter recommended a particular Lebanese red before cheerfully admitting that he hadn’t touched alcohol for 20 years.
Which is why I like an Italian restaurant in Notting Hill called Canteen that opened last year. It has no wine list. The choice is simply between red and white. Kingsley Amis said that the most depressing words in the English language are ‘Red or white?’, but to me this sounds liberating.
Ordering wine is complicated, and smartphones don’t make it any easier. You can now search for a bottle and wince at the mark-up. Jeroboams has this Chianti for £18.95 so why is it £85 on the menu? You can compare the score with hundreds of people who have tried it: ‘3.9 on Vivino, is that good?’ Or find out what professionals think: ‘Jancis says that it has silky tannins, you like silky tannins, don’t you?’ You sometimes see groups of wine bores passing the list around while searching on their smartphones.
That’s before you even get to ordering the food. There are apps which promise to match your food to the wine, but what do you do if one person is having the oxtail and the other a Thai fish curry? We are suffering from an overload of information.
Kingsley Amis said that the most depressing words in the English language are ‘Red or white?’
So I think it’s laudable that Canteen is taking all the anxiety out of ordering. A good restaurant should take pride in its house wine. The late Russell Norman, founder of Polpo and later Brutto in Clerkenwell, said that he always made sure the ordinary wine punched well above its weight.
With strongly flavoured food such as anchovy pizzas or spaghetti puttanesca, simple wine is usually the best choice. Canteen’s philosophy reminds me of eating outside a butcher’s shop in Catania, Sicily, where we chose bits of meat to be grilled and then they plonked down a plastic litre bottle of basic red to wash it down with. But because this is London 2025, a bottle of house wine at Canteen costs £47. Jesus. And it comes out of a keg.
Which gets to the heart of the problem with this pared-down approach. It might work in Italy, or even in the cheaper parts of England where you can find something drinkable for £25, but if I’m paying nearly 50 quid for a bottle, then I want a bit of theatre. The pop of the cork, the hovering waiter, the tentative sniff of the wine, the anxiety. It’s all part of the magic of eating out.
The other problem is that restaurants make most of their profit from the wine. Those oligarchs in the corner guzzling Pétrus are subsidising your food. Vastly simplifying the wine list means that the owner is going to have to charge you more for your meal.
We need a two-tier approach. Most restaurants, and certainly pubs, should simply offer red and white, and pink as well. You’d be mad not to offer rosé and something sparkling too, but please not prosecco. Then more fancy restaurants can have a proper wine list in a leather book, as long as they employ someone to help customers with it. A specialist wine waiter. Just needs a catchy name, something French… or sommthing?
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