For diners at a fancy restaurant in Cheshire, there is now a new twist to the usual routine. First comes La Popote’s menu, created by the owners, the chef Joe Rawlins and Gaëlle Radigon, who live upstairs with their children. Next comes the wine list, which includes more than 100 bottles. And then, in what is very much a first for Cheshire, a water list.
Rawlins, 32, presents the new menu as I get comfy in the dining room in a converted redbrick barn in Marton, a village halfway between Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent. A choice of seven waters ranges from a £5 bottle of Crag, which comes from the nearby Peak District, to Vidago, a mineral-rich water from a Portuguese spa town, which will cost you £19.
At a loss as to why I would need a water menu – or how a bottle could cost more than I would spend on wine – I consult La Popote’s water sommelier. Doran Binder, who created the menu, is part of a growing global mission of water evangelists with an unquenchable conviction. For Binder and his ilk, water has for too long been sidelined. He believes it deserves to be celebrated as a proper drink.
“Water is a beautiful thing and I just want people to experiment and enjoy it in a way that they’ve never done before,” says Binder, 53, whose brimming passion gives his speech a staccato energy. Sensing my scepticism, he tells me it’s OK to laugh at the concept of water connoisseurship. “I’ve been trying to get restaurants to do this for years and I think people are nervous, because you’re either going to be a pioneer or a joke. It’s a gamble, but it’s actually better when people laugh, because, to me, it just shows how poor our relationship with water is.”
I go for the crab starter, a classic mayonnaise-based dish with fennel and apple. “I’d probably try the Lauretana, or maybe Icelandic Glacial Water if you didn’t want sparkling, just because it’s also super-low and isn’t going to overpower the delicate crab,” says Binder, whose Viking-red beard (he is half Danish) inspired his online persona, the Bearded Water Sommelier. He tells me he gets 7m views a month across social media.
“Super-low” refers to the minerality of water, the crucial factor in determining its taste. I am a water laggard, I warn Binder, who is helping to train the restaurant’s waiting staff. I never order bottled water and quite like my local hard, limescale-rich London tap water, with its notes of chlorine. Other than briefly noting the softer tap water in other parts of the country, I have rarely given water a second thought.
Anyway, mineral content can be measured by evaporating a sample and weighing what is left as milligrams per litre of total dissolved solids (TDS). We are talking sodium, calcium, magnesium and potassium. Low‑TDS, or soft, waters are delicate and have changed little since they fell from the sky, whether they have been locked in a glacier or cycled quickly through a spring. High-TDS, or hard, waters may have spent years sloshing around rocks, absorbing minerals underground.
Geology dictates the combination and quantity of these minerals and creates a water’s taste. “If it’s sodium, it’s salty. If it’s calcium, it’s slightly sweet. And if it’s magnesium, it’s slightly bitter,” Binder says.
I go for the Lauretana (£12 a bottle), a gently carbonated spring water from the Piedmont region in north-west Italy. It has a TDS of just 14, which is about as low as it gets. A waiter pours me a glass. “We always serve water in wine glasses; it shows it respect,” says Binder, who also drinks it only at room temperature – he says chilling it kills any flavour.
I swill a sip around my mouth before drinking. It’s a weird sensation. The water is so soft and smooth that it almost slides, rather than flows, off my tongue. It’s like drinking an Hermès scarf. Yet, a second later, I am left with a tacky, metallic dryness in my mouth – something to do with the water’s low pH level, apparently. When I follow a forkful of salty crab with another sip, the dryness goes away and the water enhances the crab’s creaminess. It works strangely well.
During a fuller tasting session after lunch, Binder guides me to the opposite end of the scale with a glass of Vichy Célestins (£9), from the spa town of Vichy in central France. Its huge TDS of more than 3,300 (UK tap water tends to be below 400) is evident the second I take a sip. It takes me a moment to work out what is going on. “Tell me that isn’t flipping nuts!” Binder says, almost levitating as he watches me. “This is my favourite water in the world.” It has a sweet brackishness and a gentle, natural fizz (many waters absorb CO2 underground). It’s unlike anything I have tasted, like a softened, strangely moreish seawater. Binder recommends it as a complement to heavier dishes such as beef.
Binder and La Popote see an opportunity in the shift away from booze, positioning water as a rival not just to wine, but also to the low- or no-alcohol drinks, seltzers and mocktails that are flooding the market. “Even in France, people are saying they want more non-alcoholic choices,” says Radigon, 37, who met Rawlins at another restaurant. They took over La Popote in 2019. “When I was pregnant, I found it was so limited. We need to move on with what people want.”
If health is driving the shift, even if that means “zebra” drinking – alternating between booze and no alcohol – then hydro evangelists believe that waters of note are going to be hard to beat when so many alternatives are packed with sugar and additives.
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Yet even Binder was sceptical not long ago. He had been working in the haircare industry in New York when, after a divorce, he bought the Crag Inn, a failing pub in the Peak District, about 10 miles from La Popote. He thought about reviving it, despite being teetotal, while regularly travelling back to New York for work. But when he got the pub’s neglected spring fixed and tested, he learned he was sitting on a liquid goldmine of uncommonly clean, silky water.
“I phoned Doran when he was in New York and said: ‘You should sell everything you’ve got, come back here and start bottling this stuff,’” says Richard Taylor, a veteran water supply engineer at Blair Water Group, who did the work.
By 2018, Binder had quit his job to launch Crag spring water, turning the pub into a ramshackle bottling plant with a water bar for tastings. Today, a team of 15 produces more than 12,000 bottles a week from the spring under the pub’s car park. They use only reusable glass bottles, which the company collects when it delivers. La Popote was one of the first restaurants to sign up. Other customers have included Sketch, the high-end restaurant in Mayfair, London, and the grocery service Modern Milkman.
Stunned by early interest, Binder wanted to learn more about his water. He heard about Michael Mascha, an Austrian in Texas whom Binder describes as the “godfather of water”. An original 1990s tech guy, Mascha lost out in the first dotcom bust. At about the same time, his cardiologist advised him to give up wine. Although he had a cellar full of it, he reluctantly agreed to stick to water.
Frustrated by the standard “still or sparkling?” offer, he began discovering new labels. In 2002, he founded FineWaters, which now has a spin-off society, academy, conference and consulting arm. His book of the same name is a guide to 100 premium waters, from Abatilles in France to Zaječická hořká, a rich Czech water that has been prized for its purported health benefits since the 16th century.
Mascha runs an online training course for fellow enthusiasts and has certified more than 100 sommeliers, including Binder. He says demand is fizzing. “We’re finally moving away from considering water just for hydration and towards water as an experience,” he says.
He is not alone in spotting momentum at the top end of the market. “What feels different now is the kind of customer we’re getting,” says Michael Tanousis, who in 2007 launched the British online water boutique Aqua Amore, which has seen demand grow steadily in recent years. “People are coming to us looking for specifics, not just ‘bottled water’. It’s ‘low-sodium’ or ‘high-mineral’, or more provenance-driven.”
But isn’t bottled water an environmental disaster? Mascha acknowledges the impact of the wider industry, but says the vast majority of what people buy is processed. “It’s basically tap water that runs into a factory and then people drive to supermarkets to buy plastic bottles and take it home; it’s totally stupid,” he says. (If it doesn’t say “natural”, “spring” or “mineral” on the bottle, it’s probably packaged tap water.) He doesn’t see premium bottles as an alternative to tap water, which he drinks, but to wine or other occasional drinks. “What we’re talking about is waters that are unique, that have a terroir and deserve to be bottled,” Mascha says.
Binder urges more water brands to commit to collecting reusable glass bottles; while glass bottles can be recycled, they often aren’t, which wastes even more of the huge amount of energy it takes to make and ship them.
Rawlins may feel like a pioneer, but water menus are not new. Mascha says more than a dozen restaurants in the US have one. In the UK, Claridge’s tried one in 2007, but it didn’t stick. A growing community of water sommeliers and enthusiasts believe consumers are now ready after years in which water has served only as a staple. “In Italy or France, people have a much better understanding, but here there has been a bit of a disconnect,” says Milin Patel, an environmental scientist turned drinking water expert in south-west London. “I also don’t think Peckham Spring did us any favours,” he adds, recalling a 1992 episode of Only Fools and Horses (Mother Nature’s Son) in which Del Boy fraudulently bottled tap water in his flat.
As part of his work, Patel carries out water tastings for school and corporate groups. “You see it in their eyes. They’re like: ‘Oh, wow, I’ve never looked at water in this way,’” he says. He hopes growing understanding of water may inspire new respect for all our water uses and sources.
Growing awareness has inspired producers, too. In a few months’ time, Murray Diplock will start selling the spring water that irrigates his cress farm from a chalk aquifer in the Test valley in Hampshire. Diplock and his family have always drunk the water themselves, filling old milk bottles with it. He has now invested in a small bottling plant and created a brand: Chorq.
As well as using standard glass bottles, Diplock wants to lean into the no-alcohol market with carbonated Chorq in champagne-style bottles with corks that pop. “We want to start running courses and tastings to help explain to people what we’re doing and why,” he says. “Water is piquing everyone’s interest and we’re hoping it’s about to really take off.”
Back in Cheshire, Rawlins hopes to add a water night to the steak and cheese nights he already offers. He insists the menu is no gimmick. “We might chop and change the waters, but the list is here to stay,” he says.
Before I leave La Popote, I try the £19 Vidago, which is sold in limited numbers in Lalique-like frosted bottles. With a TDS of nearly 3,000, it’s almost as rich as Vichy Célestins, but it tastes more gently salted. I try another sip with some Parma ham; the salt in the water seems to disappear as the tastes mingle in my mouth.
Whether or not I have soaked up all of Binder’s zeal, the experience has been eye-opening – and certainly more mindful than my usual approach to food and drink, which involves consuming it like a hungry pelican. “I spend my life playing with food and water like this and even now it’s still flipping mind-blowing for me,” Binder says. He pours out one more glass and hands it to me: “Wait till you try this ...”
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