London For Wine Lovers: What's New

In one of the world’s great centres for dining and drinking out, the pace of progress is at times hectic. Fiona Beckett picks her top 10 of the latest venue openings.

- Fiona Beckett

NOT A WEEK seems to pass without the announcement of another new restaurant or bar opening with a stellar wine list. Nothing new for London, you might say – it’s always been a mecca for wine lovers, but not quite in the way it is now.

For a start, it’s hard to tell the difference between restaurants and wine bars these days. The economics of the business mean that bars need to serve food and restaurants wine, so you get many places that call themselves bars that serve seriously ambitious food and restaurants that dedicate a significant number of covers to their bar – a boon for those who are eating on their own. The centre of gravity has also switched eastwards from the West End to the north and east of London. No one, of course, can afford Mayfair rents, apart from a few well-heeled exceptions such as Russian-owned Hide, so it’s all about Shoreditch and Hackney now.

The other big change is the seemingly unstoppable rise of natural wines. It’s almost de rigueur for a new restaurant to have a natural wine list – it goes with the dude-food and the open-fire cooking. A natural wine mafia seems to have developed among chefs and restaurateurs, as you’ll see from the openings below where teams move on to be replaced by their mates doing something remarkably similar.

Like buses they seem to come in clusters. For example, Jackson Boxer and Andrew Clarke’s St Leonard’s is just down the road from Jack Lewen’s (ex-Ellory) Leroy. The Laughing Heart is a few paces from Sager & Wilde, which in turn is not far from Bright. Without much difficulty, you can embark on a natural wine bar crawl.

Finally, an interesting straw in the wind. Two of the establishments I mention are backed by wine companies: Clarette by Château Margaux and Bar Douro by the Churchill Port family.