Top 10 restaurant wine lists in London 2018

David Moore’s Fitzrovia flagship features wines bought with care over the restaurant’s 26-year history, as well as fresh new finds. Waiter-turned-dynamic restaurateur and TV personality, David Moore rose from the role of head waiter of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons’ (then unheard of as a Brit) to become a familiar face on TV’s The Restaurant. The kitchens of Pied a Terre, his flagship multi-level Fitzrovia restaurant, chic bar and private dining room (which was once his bedroom) have helped launch a gamut of great chefs into international orbit.

Cuisine: French

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Still one of the top-draw wine experiences in London with a sommelier team that is at the top of its game. Located amid the galleries and auction rooms of Mayfair, the refurbished, gallery-like, chic dining room features boldly wrought square canvases on its anthracite coloured walls. The Square’s actually square shaped but encompassing wine list runs to 2,500 references, being a miscellany of the great and the good of the global wine world, with circa 60 wines offered by the glass, often served in if not square, notably angular stemware.

Cuisine: French

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One of the most important aspects of a wine list is to be able to offer bottles at varying stages of their maturity to suit all palates, says sommelier, James Lloyd, “but our list does lean towards the more mature”. The glamorous petite dining salon saw a kitchen refurbishment in January, resulting in the movement of a few bottles from cool cabinets in this space off site. However, wines of the highest quality remain, which “have to make sense for the money,” and “be ready to drink,” according to laser-sharp head sommelier, Lloyd who has authored an entertaining list featuring charts, maps, flavour wheels and textual factoids, such as “back in the day, Montrachet was the wine Grace Kelly brought to wheelchair-bound Jimmy Stewart’s apartment in Rear Window along with a meal from the 21 Club. We would willingly break one of our legs for that kind of delivery service”.

Cuisine: French

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“Wine is a part of your meal and can’t be left to amateurs,” says Brittany born head sommelier, Antonin Dubuis. Clos Maggiore’s list opens with a quote from Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon – “Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing…”

Cuisine: French

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Feted as the largest wine list in London, this is a supermodel of a collection from start to finish. Sommelier and wine judge, Elvis Ziakos oversees circa 3,500 bins at Mayfair’s Greenhouse, a sharp restaurant owned by Marlon Abela along with The Square, Umu and Morton’s club. “Our gastronomic identity focuses on the great region of Burgundy!” says Ziakos of the invincible list, built with patience and strategy, “from the simplicity of Mâcon, to Chablis from Raveneau, Jean-François’ Coche-Dury and Comte Lafon, with reds lead by the great names such as Armand Rousseau, Domaine Dujac, Sylvain Cathiard and the sumptuous Domaine de la Romanée-Conti”. Ziakos further enriches the list, which runs to more than 120 pages, with distinctive and consistent producers from the rest of the world, such as Château Yvonne from the Loire Valley, Veyder-Malberg from Wachau, and David & Nadia Sadie from Swartland of South Africa.

Cuisine: European

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What a joy. A list with the input of two Masters of Wine – Richard Harvey and Anthony Barne – was always going to get off to a flyer at the new Bonhams restaurant. Located at the auction house, but with its own entrance off Haunch of Venison Yard, Bonhams’ minimalist styling is broken by flashes of bright art. The wine list, assembled by Master of Wine, Richard Harvey, who heads Bonhams International Wine Department and former sommelier of Bibendum and trained tea taster, Charlotte Logan-Jones offers consistently significantly positively exemplary value. The cash to pleasure ratio is simply so rewarding, with some wines actually cheaper than retail, yet served impeccably within this calibrated, Michelin starred, super-chic restaurant.

Cuisine: European

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Wine Director and Master Sommelier, Piotr Pietras leads the large team at the much anticipated ‘wine lover’s Mecca’ brought to you by the minds behind Hedonism Wines and chef, Ollie Dabbous. Hide’s wine list opens with the words, “a corkscrew, a glass, a memory”. Formerly Fakhreldine (a restaurant named after a Lebanese prince) 85 Piccadilly has been re-oriented as a calibrated ‘wine lover’s Mecca connected by spiral staircase’ according to dynamic Wine Director, Piotr Pietras. With cork pillars, vine leaf plasterwork and the occasional bottle-shaped door, both of its restaurants and inventive cocktail bar, are a collaboration between Evgeny Chichvarkin and Tatiana Fokina, minds behind the nearby Hedonism Wines, chef, Ollie Dabbous (a protégé of Raymond Blanc), and mixologist, Oskar Kinberg.

Cuisine: British

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After rising in the glass lift, follow the ruby, red wine-like ribbon running through the deep carpet to discover a number of clubby salons, including the Latour dining room, attended by the dapper former sommelier of Gordon Ramsay’s Royal Hospital Road turned Director of Wine and Château Latour and Artemis Domaines Ambassador, Jan Konetzki. Konetzki’s list features the iconic lion on tower logo of Latour on the first page of the beautifully minimalist document which features no fewer than six pages dedicated to the château, linking, at a heavily loaded credit card’s swipe, to an array of dazzling bottles, magnums, double magnums, jeroboams and imperials ranging back to the 1930s. The 1959 rendition is ‘Le Big Mac’ advises Konetzki.

Cuisine: French

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Perhaps the daddy of them all in London, though we should point out straight away that 67 Pall Mall is a members’ club. If you have a couple of grand to spare, it’d be well spent – members have access to an unrivalled list of wines, all of them sold at an eminently sensible price. Running to well over 4,000 bottles, the core list is intended to ‘excite, challenge and captivate’ members at Green Park’s well-upholstered, art-filled, 67 Pall Mall, says founder and CEO, Grant Ashton (a former City trader), with thousands of cases of the finest and rarest wines stored in the extensive cellars below ground in this grade II listed former bank.

Cuisine: European

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