On any given night in London a sommelier may open a bottle most of the room has never before encountered. A grower champagne poured in Soho which quietly displaces a grande marque from the list. A pale, tensile, saline Assyrtiko suggested with sashimi in Mayfair, soon appearing across neighbouring restaurants once buyers notice how well it behaves at table. An amber wine poured with laksa in Shoreditch. A Jura chardonnay offered to a curious table in the City which converts drinkers who once swore allegiance to Burgundy alone.
London is not simply a place where wine is consumed. It is where wine is tested in public. Bottles meet food, money, fatigue. Some collapse after the first rush of enthusiasm. Others endure. For a sommelier, the dining room is a laboratory conducted in real time. Every service tests which wines survive the table and which fade once the second glass arrives.
For decades the restaurant floor has functioned as one of the most effective distribution systems for taste. Trends are refined, accelerated, and even dismantled there. Now something more interesting is happening: the people who once decided what the world drinks are beginning to make the wine themselves.
The restaurant as a laboratory
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Wines crafted with a sommelier’s palate rarely emerge from the most obvious regions. The emphasis falls on balance, nerve and drinkability rather than sheer fruit power and excessive oak.
In Battersea, beneath two railway arches where trains rattle overhead, Sergio Verrillo runs Blackbook Winery with his wife, Lynsey. The space feels urban and improvised. Verrillo grew up in the United States with Italian and Hungarian parents who made wine at home. A career in music gave way to hospitality, which led him to Gordon Ramsay’s Maze and eventually to oenology studies at Plumpton College.
Today, he sources grapes within reach of London. Tamesis bacchus, grown organically at Forty Hall in Enfield, shows brightness and restraint. It feels like London wine in temperament. Direct, alert and refreshingly uninterested in pastoral romance (£26, blackbookwinery.com).
Across town at the three-Michelin-starred Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, Dmytro Goncharuk runs one of the capital’s most exacting wine programmes. Once crowned Best Sommelier of Ukraine, he conceived his own label, Token, with his wife Alyona while sailing in Suffolk. The wines are made organically in Friuli Colli Orientali with Giacomo Orlando. Ribolla gialla arrives textured, yet lifted. Franconia carries nerve rather than weight. The now-sold-out orange ribolla quickly became near mythical amongst his peers. Token reads like London fine dining discipline translated into northeastern Italian soil (£35, thesampler.co.uk).
Terry Kandylis approached winemaking through discovery rather than design. Former head of wine at 67 Pall Mall and now group wine director across Noble Rot, he came across abandoned bush vines in Ribera del Duero and began restoring them. In a region long associated with extraction and new oak, his instinct runs toward change. Wild fermentations replace laboratory control. Foot treading replaces machinery. Production is measured in hundreds rather than thousands. Albillo mayor takes shape in older barrels with a saline edge. Clarete returns to its historic form, red and white grapes fermenting together. Ancient co-planted vineyards yield field blends handled with gentle extraction and modest alcohol.
Years spent stewarding fiercely contested allocations of grand cru Burgundy taught Kandylis something Ribera sometimes forgets: tension travels further across a meal than weight. His wines sold under the Bendito Destino label (from £75, shrinetothevine.co.uk).
At China Tang inside the Dorchester, Serbian-born Igor Sotric has shaped one of London’s most polished wine lists for more than a decade. A microbiology graduate with restless curiosity, he collaborates with Marijan Simcic in neighbouring Slovenia’s Goriska Brda to produce a parcel of chardonnay built for food and longevity. The wine reflects the palate of someone who has tasted thousands of bottles blind and learned to distrust fashion. Balance survives hype. The previous vintage sold out swiftly, your reviewer responsible for finishing the last of the 2023, while the forthcoming 2024 will appear in small quantities at Hedonism and Golborne Fine Wine (£35-40), and China Tang itself.
Coll vineyard
Coll vineyard
Vincent Pastorello spends his professional life as global wine and beverage manager for Dream International, overseeing lists at Amazonico, Coya, Oblix, Roka and Zuma. His own projects remain deliberately boutique, by contrast. At Château Pech-Latt in Corbières he produces Cuvée Réflexion from individually selected, tree-like vines within the estate’s organically farmed vineyards set between mountain air and Mediterranean wind.
Old vine grenache forms the core with carignan and small portions of syrah and cinsault from vines approaching 80 years of age. The fruit is harvested by taste rather than analysis and fermented parcel-by-parcel in stainless steel to preserve brightness, line, and absolute harmony.
Another project lies in Sant Sadurní d’Anoia in Penedès where, alongside the legendary Pepe Raventós, Pastorello produces vinya del coll. The still wine, from a region better known for bubbles, stems from a 1.6 hectare plot of Xarel-lo planted in 1965 and worked by two magnificent Breton horses (both at friarwood.com from £46.30).
Yohann Pinol trained at the culinary school in Tain-l’Hermitage before guiding the drinks at Wilton’s, and later as a Louis XIII brand ambassador. His wine project, Elama is produced in the southern Rhône near the village of Cairanne, roughly 60 miles south of Tain. Each release is wrapped in an abstract label created by artist, Jemma Appleby, giving the small project a visual identity as distinctive as the wine itself. Meticulously crafted in parcels of maximum 600 bottles, the utterly drinkable wine, which benefits from a light chill, is predominantly grenache with a touch of old vine clairette raised in used Burgundy barrels (£29, ealingwinecellars.com).
Pinol’s fascination with proportion also appears in his work with L’Époque Baroque XO Cognac, a project which sits at the intersection of wine, spirits and art. The Cognac is assembled with the same blending precision as a fine cuvée and presented with striking visual design by the creative director of Annabel’s, suggesting a sommelier’s instinct expressed in another medium (£360, hackstons.com).
Emanuel Pesqueira, pictured at the top of this page, began as a chef, spending a decade aboard Crystal Cruises, “where I saw more than 3,000 cities around the world,” before moving onto the restaurant floor and ultimately becoming wine director for the Gordon Ramsay Group. A committed diver, he now lowers bottles into the Atlantic off Portugal’s Alentejo coast, suspending them in metal cages between 10 and 50 metres below the surface where darkness, cold and mounting pressure slow development in ways no cellar can reproduce. The experiment began with a local Gewürztraminer before expanding to around 900 bottles drawn from across the world – grande marque champagne, super Tuscans, leading Burgundies, and even hallowed spirits. When the cages are raised the bottles return armoured in shells. Fittingly, the results now appear aboard superyachts supplied by the VIP Santori Club, whose private network connects travel, gastronomy and access for an international membership (santoriclub.com).
Tara Oak
Tara Oak
Tara Ozols of Dovetale at 1 Hotel Mayfair, recipient of the Michelin Sommelier Award, wisely took her instincts not to her native Connecticut, but Gran Canaria where she co-founded Bodegas Todos. The name means “all” in Spanish and also reflects the initials of its three founders. Serendipitously, the label carries an inverted triangle linked to the ancient fertility goddess, Tara, once revered by the island’s original Canarios. The symbol resembles a womb containing sun, ocean, volcano, soil and wind. The wines reflect that landscape. Listán blanco and malvasía delivers vivid Atlantic salinity and mineral life, while listán negro offers cracked pepper and savoury depth drawn from black volcanic soils (from £25, wanderlustwine.co.uk).
From a dormant volcano to a famously active one, Sicilian-born Giovanni Ferlito, head of wine at The Ritz, contributes to Monterosso on the slopes of Mount Etna where nerello mascalese grows in iron rich soils overlooking the Ionian Sea. The landscape of Etna is as wild and rugged as The Ritz is refined. The resulting wine, Sisma, balances altitude, sea influence and volcanic energy with careful precision (£49.10, hedonism.co.uk).
Honey Spencer moves with ease between cellar, service, and selection. A sommelier by training, and ambassador for Nude Glass, she also blends wines for the list at Georgian-owned Heddon Street restaurant DakaDaka. Her pirveli kisi from Kakheti draws fruit from two valley vineyards, offering a direct introduction to the charmingly named grape. Orchard fruit and lifted pear define a wine which opens the door neatly to the country widely held as the birthplace of wine (£17 per glass, DakaDaka). Beyond the restaurant, she curates wines across Eurostar routes and runs the east London wine bar, Sune, with husband Charlie Simms.
Taken together, these projects reveal a shared sensibility. Sommeliers understand wine as something which unfolds through time, food, and conversation. They know the bottles which tire the palate and those which carry a table deep into the evening.For decades London’s dining rooms shaped what the world drinks. Increasingly they are influencing what the world makes. The floor has stepped into the vineyard.