When? What? Where? – Wine Tastings in London

Gaining an overview of wine events across London📅 with UnscrewMe helps to select interesting tastings🔖 , making discovering new wines easier than ever🍷.

Since starting UnscrewMe, we’ve gotten a much better overview of all the wine events that are happening in London all the time.

A continuous effort to create the best and most comprehensive calendar of wine events in London drives our search for new wine shops and events.

Almost every week, we find a couple of new tastings that we want to add, to give all Londoners easier access to discovering great wine. Sometimes, the novelty is in the location of a wine shop, sometimes it is a unique event format, and sometimes it is about an exciting selection of wines. Taking into account all of these aspects is equally important to make UnscrewMe better.

Finding fun formats

What is striking is the variety of styles and event formats. The wide range of wine shops and event organisers in London allows for tastings in all different niches for all kinds of people.

It is as easy to find an informal, casual tasting or a more formal, dressy fine wine event as it is to find a highly technical, in-depth masterclass. The category of wine dinners with dishes to match the wines also is increasingly popular.

One of our favourite formats are events with actual winemakers.

The different event formats are also available on a number of experience levels. It does not matter whether you only enjoy a glass of wine every now and then and want to learn a little bit more, or whether you already know a lot about winemaking techniques and wines. With a bit of searching, you should be able to find an event that caters for your interest and level of knowledge.

This characteristic of the wine event landscape in London also extends to the price range. Besides free tastings, there are also events for all budgets, starting from highly affordable to very premium.

Events everywhere

Something that we never realised to this extent before is that many wine shops are strongly focused on their local community.

There are a lot of tastings in central London around zone 1. But with shops scattered across all areas and zones, one can also find many tastings outside of the most central postcodes.

The availability of high-quality wine tastings being held at shops in many different locations also makes wine tastings much more easily accessible than many other events – if you only know what events are scheduled in your area of interest.

Out of the ordinary

Another dimension which makes wine tasting in London so interesting is the open-mindedness of many wine shops. English wine is becoming increasingly popular and there are long established relationships to classic wine regions such as Bordeaux. Still, many event organisers regularly look beyond the established producers and offer tastings focusing on up and coming wine regions or uncommon grape varieties.

By looking at many different tastings, some wine trends also become more obvious, be it styles like organic wine, natural wine or emerging wine countries. Often, several independent shops and organisers feature similar regions and wines around the same time, which could help in putting together a bigger picture.

However, even if you only care about a particular region, you benefit from the many independent shops. Usually, almost every month or even week you can find a tasting for some of the classic wine countries and regions, giving you no excuse not to venture out and try some new wines from your preferred area that you think you already know.

Encouraging experimentation

Change is a constant in London, this also applies to wine shops and wine tastings. While this makes our work more difficult, it also ensures that wine tasting in London never gets boring.

The wide selection of events from small, personal tastings to large trade fairs covers all preferences and moods. Being able to choose from such a number of wine events offers plenty of opportunities to broaden one’s wine horizon.

Our goal is to build up a central calendar, where you can find wine events every week and in many different locations. By making it easier for you to explore the world of wine, we want to encourage you to learn more, taste more and have more fun! 🍾

Our next article will kickstart a new regular feature. Since we not only write about wine tastings, but also go to many tastings and drink plenty of wine, we will start to highlight some wines we particularly liked in each month. Stay tuned for the first issue of our monthly wine highlights!

(As so often, I probably did most of the writing at Kaffeine with a coffee☕️. But I also made some edits🖊 after my WSET Level 3 course with Raul Diaz, where we were tasting great French wines🇫🇷 all day at the stunning Corinthia Hotel London, from Chablis in Burgundy to Château d’Arcole from the Saint-Emilion Grand Cru appellation in Bordeaux🍷.
Finalising the article over dinner at newly opened Chinese🇨🇳 fusion restaurant RedFarm in Covent Garden, I swerved away from wine🤭 and moved on to cocktails🍸. I got the opportunity to sample some Brooklyn Gin from New York City🇺🇸 and went on to enjoy a beautifully simple gin cocktail called “Kill Some Thyme”, before getting a fruity and refreshing mix with flavoured Grey Goose La Poire vodka and black peppercorn called “The Perfect Pear”🍐).