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Top 10 restaurant wine lists in London 2018

Following the release of Wine List Confidential’s 2018 guide to the best restaurants in London for wine lovers, we reveal the top 10 best-performing restaurants based on the strength of their wine list, and the sommeliers behind them.

Wine List Confidential, brought to you by the drinks business, is the first platform to rank London’s restaurants on the strength of their wine list alone, providing a comprehensive guide to the best restaurants in the capital for wine lovers. Restaurants are graded on a 100-point scale based on five criteria: size, value, service, range and originality.

Earlier this year we launched our second Wine List Confidential Guide to London’s best restaurants for wine lovers, collating the top 100 highest-scoring restaurants into a comprehensive 200-page 2018 guide following months of judging by our expert reviewer, Douglas Blyde.

Here, we bring you the very best restaurants in London for wine, as rated by WLC’s unique scoring system, based on their overall score. These were the restaurants that scored most highly across all aspects, with service, value, size, originality and range all on point.

In short, they represent the very best places in London to drink wine.

Click through to see which of the capital’s restaurants made the grade… 

The 2018 digital guide is available to buy here, with a hard copy also available at a cost of £12. Please email niall@thedrinksbusiness.com to order a copy. To see the full Wine List Confidential 2018 listings visit winelistconfidential.com

10. Les 110 de Taillevent

With 110 wines by the glass, this London outpost is the successful sequel to the original famous Paris restaurant. Taillevent was founded in Paris after the end of World War II in tribute to fourteenth century court cook, Guillaume Tirel (called Taillevent). The London outpost opened in Marylebone in August 2015 with 110 of some 330 bins available by the glass, curated by sommelier Christopher Lecoufle. 

Cuisine: French

BEST FOR

  • 110 wines by the glass paired expertly with food
  • Big and sometimes very big bottles
  • Blind Tasting opportunities

To read the full WLC review, click here.

9. Pied à Terre

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

BEST FOR

  • A selection of engagingly described wine flights
  • Central Fitzrovia location
  • Well priced wine inclusive lunch
  • Vegetarian and Vegan menus

To read the full WLC review, click here.

8. The Square

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

BEST FOR

  • Modern haute cuisine
  • Choosing from 2,500 wines
  • Art work by Oscar Murillo and David Altmedj

To read the full review, click here.

7. Restaurant Gordon Ramsay

Exterior of Royal Hospital Road

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

BEST FOR

  • Special occasions
  • Bespoke tasting menus paired with wines
  • Triple Michelin-starred dining

To read the full review, click here.

6. Clos Maggiore

“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

BEST FOR

  • The romantic cherry blossom conservatory
  • Central Covent Garden
  • The 100 page wine list

To read the full review, click here.

5. The Greenhouse

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

BEST FOR

  • A two-michelin-starred menu by Arnaud Bignon
  • Older vintage classics
  • Tranquil dining in the heart of London

To read the full review, click here.

4. Bonhams Restaurant

Credit: Richard Houghton

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

BEST FOR

  • Checking out the upcoming Bonhams auction lots
  • Elegant dishes by chef Tom Kemble
  • Small parcel wines bought in from sales

To read the full review, click here.

3. Hide

Hide’s Ground Restaurant

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

BEST FOR

  • Three floors dedicated to the fermented grape
  • Access to Hedonism Wines’ catalogue
  • Deft plates by Ollie Dabbous
  • Location overlooking Green Park
  • A fine smelling on-site bakery

To read the full review, click here.

2. Ten Trinity Square Private Club

Ten Trinity Square Private Club’s private dining room

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

BEST FOR

  • Soaking up the ornate surroundings of the Four Seasons
  • The Latour fanatic
  • Triple Michelin-starred dining

To read the full review, click here.

1. 67 Pall Mall

The Naughty Corner

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

BEST FOR

  • Vast by-the-glass selection
  • Architecture by Sir Edwin Lutyens
  • Refined classic dishes
  • The Naughty Corner

To read the full review, click here.

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