Tom Howells on the five best places to drink wine in London

Boozing in London is a multifaceted joy: a landscape of delectable poisons of all stripes and, crucially, a consummate wine drinker’s city.

As an occasionally penniless food journalist subsisting on PR handouts (and the kind of man who has, quite delightedly, quaffed €3 flagons of indeterminate Carrefour plonk on numerous bicycle tours), I’d always been of the mindset that, like pizza and gelato before it, even crap wine was a better-than-average beverage. London has changed that thinking (a bit).

The scope of good drinking here is mind-bending. This is a town overflowing with dedicated bars, convivial bottle shops, vineyards in striking distance of the city, urban winemakers and brilliantly curated restaurant lists offering everything from palate-smashing, low-intervention (AKA natural or natty) funk to premier-cru French reds at prices that would make even a minor aristocrat wince.

Given the heady provision of the stuff in London, this book is just a snapshot of the scene. There are conspicuous omissions, but there’s something here for everyone. I’ve curated the five venues from The Opinionated Guide to Wine London that I feel best summarise what it means to drink wine in London right now. Get sipping.

St John founders Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver

107 exterior

Noble Rot

It’s tough to play down just what impact Noble Rot’s Chin Chin house wine – a zesty, lightly acidic vinho verde – has had on London’s more youthful wine-sloshing scene (not least as inspiration for umpteen hipster-baiting Hackney memes). But this micro-empire – comprising three restaurants, an importer (Keeling Andrew & Co), two shops (Shrine to the Vine) and a colourful magazine that’s almost single-handedly destuffified and democratised the world of wine writing – is so much more than one bottle. Splendid food aside (the turbot braised in oxidised Bâtard-Montrachet is a staple), the book-sized carte at its claret-red Bloomsbury flagship restaurant is essential reading for any self-respecting wine buff, with some high-end, bucket-list bangers available by the glass.

107

The sudden demise of P. Franco – perhaps the formative second-wave London natural wine bar – was a seismic shock to the city’s wine buffs in March 2023. But from the ashes rose 107: P. Franco v.2 in all but name, helmed by the same manager, William Gee, in the same spot, with the same mission. It’s a little more fanatical than most. Gee is almost radically committed to the natural cause, growing grapes ‘in an environment that encourages life’ (i.e. always fermented with wild yeasts, with trace amounts of stabilising sulphur), but it remains breezily informal: no bookings, a single communal table, weird and wonderful bottles with minimal markups and feted guest chefs working over a couple of hot plates.

Gordon’s

Are you a true Londoner if you’ve not been on a damp squib of a first date at Gordon’s? That’s rhetorical: Villiers Street’s finest is an institution, its archaic, liver-coloured frontage the portal to a gloriously dank, subterranean bolthole adorned with age-weathered wooden panelling, barrels of port and sherry propped behind the bar, chalkboard menus and faded royal newspaper clippings. The list is almost un-reconstructedly Old World, with few exceptions (a cabernet, shiraz and viognier blend from southern India’s Nandi Hills, anyone?); the food – cheese, baguettes, cold pies – mere ballast for the wine. The thronging summer terrace is delightful but securing a seat in the candlelit ‘cave’ room is an inimitable London experience.

40 Maltby

Public face of fab importers Gergovie (pronounced ‘ZHER-zho-VEE’, named after the Auvergne plateau from which it first sourced its wines) and second-wave icon open since 2011, 40 Maltby has become a place of pilgrimage for plonk fiends. Rightly so. Their repurposed railway arch home is perpetually thrumming; the seasonal small dishes dreamy; and the colourful metal shelves laden with an all-natural stock of takeaway bottles that can be drunk in with a £20 corkage. The initial regional ambit has expanded a tad, though they cite natural wine legends Patrick Bouju and Justine Loiseau’s Domaine la Bohème (a label stocked since the bar opened) as a winery they still particularly chime with. No bookings, but entirely worth the wait.

St John

Three decades in, Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver’s monochromatic Smithfield mainstay is as synonymous with wine as it is the nose-to-tail ethos on which it made its name. Few epicurean experiences are as blissful as settling into the clattery bar for a plate of devilled kidneys and a bottle of St John-label claret, beaujolais or, if the sun’s out, a beaming, champagne-style crémant. They work 100% directly with producers, and have done since the off, a logistically masochistic undertaking involving ‘knocking on doors in the twilight, somewhere in the profonde...’ says Gulliver. They also run their own winery, Boulevard Napoléon, in the medieval village of La Livinière in Minervois, southern France.