Little London Wine Tour December 2018

In our second discovery tour, we introduce you to four fairly new wine bars 🍷 including a sparkling wine specialist 🍾 and a decent Sunday roast 🍽.

On our mission to find the best and most interesting wines in London, we at UnscrewMe always look for new wine bars, wine shops or restaurants with decent wine lists.

Clearly, we are constantly searching for new wine events. And in this context, a new wine bar is always worth a visit too — the least we can do is a DIY tasting. That is, really just drinking two or three glasses and have a good time.

Of course, we don’t just do this for the fun of it, we want to be able to highlight some places that you should probably visit yourself as well! So, here’s the list of relatively recently opened wine bars and restaurants we checked out for you.

Cork & Bottle Hampstead, Hampstead, NW3

• Name: Cork & Bottle Hampstead
• Location: NW3, just off the Southern tip of Hampstead Heath. In contrast to the subterranean space in Leicester Square, this latest branch is light with big windows and mirrors to let the sunshine in.
• Background: Since the branch in Paddington opened a year ago or so, I wanted to check out the Sunday roast. I’ve been a few times to the Paddington branch in the evening for plenty of wine and cheese and greatly enjoyed it. And now that the new Hampstead branch opened, I finally decided to give the roast a try too.
• Wine Picks:
  2017 Grüner Veltliner “Strass” by Weingut Allram from Kamptal in Austria 🇦🇹. A great example of a Grüner Veltliner dominated by its fruit character with some savoury notes. For me, this white wine went nicely with the Sunday roast.
  2015 Itynera Montepulciano D’Abruzzo by M.G.M. Mondo del Vino from the Abruzzo region in central Italy 🇮🇹. A punchy red wine with good fruit components and a bit more oak than I usually prefer. Pretty nice with food, maybe a bit too much on its own.
• Tastings: Tastings to start in early 2019.

Grays & Feather, Covent Garden, WC2

• Name: Grays & Feather
• Location: WC2, just a few steps from Charing Cross station. A calm, relaxed and elegant little place not far from the constant hustle and bustle of Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square.
• Background: I must admit that I’ve heard of Grays & Feather for the first time when they opened the new wine bar in Covent Garden, although they were already trading at Southbank Food Market for a few months before. Their focus is on interesting and exciting sparkling wines from around the world. If that wouldn’t already be reason enough to go, the staff are also very friendly and knowledgable, happy to assist you with all the difficult choices between sparkling wines you’ve probably never heard of.
• Wine Picks:
  2014 Primordia Brut by Blackdown Ridge Estate from the South Downs in Sussex, England 🇬🇧. Made from classical Champagne grape varieties Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Meunier, tastewise this English sparkling sits somewhere between Prosecco and Champagne. Refreshing with its high acidity, bold stone fruit notes and pleasant residual sugar, it also showed a bit of bready character, typical for the traditional method.
• Tastings: Best of all, they plan to start doing regular bubbly tastings too.

Fortnum & Mason at The Royal Exchange, Bank, EC3

• Name: Fortnum & Mason at The Royal Exchange
• Location: EC3, right next to Bank station. Located inside a beautiful building, featuring a high glass ceiling over an inner courtyard, it’s a stunning place to drink a glass of wine, or two.
• Background: Everyone in London knows Fortnum & Mason. Not everyone knows that they also do wine tastings. So when I read recently that they had opened a new bar in the City, it immediately went on my list of wine bars I wanted to visit.
• Wine Picks:
  2017 Albariño by Pazo Barrantes from Rías Baixas D.O. in Galicia, Spain 🇪🇸. Impressive expression of this beautiful grape with lots of stone fruit, some grapefruit, a hint of sweet honey maybe, all balanced by typical minerality.
• Tastings: Fortnum & Mason does events at its main store in Piccadilly, but so far we don’t know whether they will also put up any events at this new outpost in the City.

Bassoon Bar, Charing Cross, SW1

• Name: Bassoon Bar at The Corinthia Hotel London
• Location: SW1, next to Charing Cross station. Arty, modern space with dimmed lights, located within a grand, former government building in Whitehall.
• Background: When I read that Sager + Wilde are working with The Corinthia on the wine and champagne selection when this bar was recently relaunched, I knew the wine list should be worth a visit.
• Wine Picks:
  2016 Kallstadter Saumagen Riesling Kabinett by Weingut Koehler-Ruprecht from the Pfalz region in Germany 🇩🇪. Stunning juice full of mineral notes and a bit of spice, thanks to the limestone soil.
• Tastings: We currently don’t know if they are planning to do any regular wine tastings — but you can always go and do your own little tasting!

How to keep discovering new places

I’ve already mentioned Hot Dinners before, which is always a good source for new openings. Recently, I also discovered skin + pulp on Instagram. And while I’m waiting for another London wine podcast to launch soon, Josh’s Wine List already sends out a weekly newsletter that sometimes also includes tips for wine bars.

As we are quickly approaching the end of December, we will next post our last wine recommendations of the year, based on what we enjoyed most this month. If you can’t wait until then, you can check out what we liked most in November.

(To balance all the wine, I wrote up the draft for this article over countless coffees ☕️ at Kaffeine, Curators Coffee Gallery, Lantana London Bridge & put it all together at my December coworking space 💻, TechHub Moorgate.)