Milan Nestarec Forks & Knives White, Moravia, Czech Republic 2018 (from £26, buonvino.co.uk, sagerandwilde.com) For reasons that we really don’t need to go into here, a number of restaurants have been finding ways to woo customers at home beyond setting up as temporary takeaways over the past year. A number of the best and swankiest in the business are now operating as posh bottle shops, opening up their artfully put-together wine lists to the general public. Some are simply selling drinks alongside their food deliveries. Others have set up specialist online stores that are a bit like virtual delis, where wine, spirits, beer and other drinks are available alongside specialist foods. The British trade magazine the Drinks Business has put together a useful list of wine-oriented restaurants that are currently operating some kind of online offie’ service. No surprise that one of London’s most adventurous wine bars, Sager + Wilde, is on the list, with this funky (in all senses) Czech natural white a reminder of where wine’s zeitgeist was before Zeit stood still.
Telmo Rodriguez Al-muvedre, Alicante, Spain 2017 (from £11.99, butlers-winecellar.co.uk; philglas-swiggot.co.uk; bentleyswine.com) Another of London’s most influential wine bar/restaurants, Noble Rot on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury, had already developed the feeling of an old, much-loved institution before the lockdown era, despite only having opened its doors for the first time in the mid-2010s. In September last year, the thoughtful, entrepreneurial duo behind Noble Rot, Mark Andrew and Dan Keeling, brought the first restaurant’s mix of serious but eclectic oenophilia and unfussily stylish food to second venue the site of the legendary Soho boho-politico hangout the Gay Hussar. Wine is very much at the heart of everything the pair does: their first venture together was their wine-and-culture ‘zine (also Noble Rot). They’ve since published a sumptuous book (Wine From Another Galaxy). And they also have a wine-importing business, Keeling Andrew & Co (keelingandrew.co.uk), which is currently offering a typically varied and delicious Rotters’ Greatest Hits case for £95, which includes Telmo Rodriguez’s supple, spicy, warming red.
Berto Gin, Piedmont, Italy (from £22.68, masterofmalt.com; philglas-swiggot.co.uk; bottleapostle.com) I wouldn’t be the first to draw a comparison between the Noble Rot empire and another, longer-running London institution run by a pair of complementary colleagues: Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver’s work with St John has similarly morphed into a mini-empire of three restaurants, a winery, and a wine company, all operating under that artfully maintained, stripped back, British canteen aesthetic. For anyone wishing to recreate the restaurants’ nose-to-tail cuisine from Henderson and Gulliver’s The Book of St John at home, matching bottles from the excellent, 100% French range of St John’s own-label wines is available at very decent prices from stjohnrestaurant.com. Covent Garden’s Bocca di Lupo, meanwhile, has put together a monthly online offering that in February moves to the Veneto, with three-course “Veneto feasts” of dishes such as baked scallops with parmesan and pork braised in milk, and a Negroni kit (£90, boccadilupoathome.com), featuring a bottle apiece of top-notch Turin distiller Berto’s vermouth, bitters and gin to make your own version of the moreishly bitter aperitif (they also do a pre-mixed version for two for £12 a pop).
Follow David Williams on Twitter @Daveydaibach
