New on Wine List Confidential: Brunswick House

Brunswick House: Wine List Confidential Score – 89.2

There’s a farmhouse near Scammonden in West Yorkshire which, improbably, is situated between the two carriageways of the M62 motorway. That same incongruity comes to mind when looking at Brunswick House in Vauxhall, a Georgian mansion which sits amid the brutal vehicular fug of Vauxhall interchange and in the looming shadow of Britain’s largest residential skyscraper complex, St George’s Wharf. It looks like it shouldn’t be there, but you’re glad that it is – all the more so when you see what its restaurant and wine list have to offer.

General manager Florian Siepert complements head chef Jackson Boxer’s stylish product-focused menu with a tidy little wine list packed with outstanding bottles from some of the best artisanal producers across Europe, including some stunners from Germany, Austria and Hungary.

France dominates, with a well-chosen and fairly affordable selection from Burgundy. They seem to like Beaujolais particularly, with good ones from natural winemakers Jérome Balmet (based near Brouilly) and the semi-legendary Guy Breton (his old-vine Morgon is on the list here).

There’s also a generous section devoted to Jura – the wonderful, tense, salty, complex Ouillé Savagnin from natural winemaker Pierre Overnoy and his protégé Emmanuel Houillon, and an eminently quaffable Poulsard from Marie-Pierre Chevassu (£37).

It’s great to see such a great listing for Central and Eastern Europe – Claus Preisinger (his orange wine), Sepp and Maria Muster, Christian Tschida, and Ewald and Birgitte Werlitsch are all names worth knowing. Gabor Karner’s Hungarian Kékfrankos (Blaufränkisch) is good; so is the Cab Sauv from Croatian travelling wine collective WMD.

As pleasantly surprising as the museum of curiosities that Brunswick House itself resembles, this is a list you’ll definitely want to revisit.

To view the full Brunswick House Wine List Confidential entry, including individual category scores and wine recommendations, click here.

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