Planque, Quality Wines, Noble Rot Soho, and More: Introducing the Resy Wine Hit List

As Quality Wines continues to mature like, well, a quality wine, there are no signs of complacency settling in. Nick Bramham’s cooking continues its peripatetic journey through the hills and valleys of southern Europe, making occasional stops along the way for something a little naughtier and more excessive: a truffle toastie here, a tuna melt there, an outrageous-sounding mortadella, burrata and pistachio pesto sandwich at some soon-to-be-specified point in the future.

Increasingly, this feels like QWF’s raison d’être: a baseline of reliable excellence, with just a little magic fairy dust sprinkled on top. It is, at root, the sort of wine bar everyone wants at the end of their road; with every visit there is, however, a little something extra that rewards those willing to travel from much further away.

And, in a city where lists can at times skew drably conformist – the same widely available natural stuff, the same unthreatening New World selections, the same predicable French heavy hitters – QWF offers proper lightning in a bottle. Cult Aussies, Greek rosés that evoke Homer’s “wine-dark sea”, Muchada L’Eclapart’s electric Palominos – all share shelf-space with New Wave South Africans, Loire garagistes and Cuvee Frederic fucking Emile. It’s thrilling, basically – an ever-updated selection of the stars of today and tomorrow, the wine equivalent of NBC’s era-defining run of must-see TV. Don’t miss out.

Magna Carta Wines, Ubuhle Izinkomo (£53)

It seems every few years another achingly hip winemaker emerges from the fragrant fynbos of South Africa’s Western Cape to reconfigure everything we thought we knew about one of the world’s most exciting wine regions. Craig Hawkins, Eben Sadie, Adi Badenhorst… and, now, Mphumi Ndlangisa, whose Magna Carta wines are slowly starting to find their way onto British shores. The Ubuhle Inzinkomo – a Muscat grown in the sunny plains of Franschhoek – is one heck of a calling card: as decadent as any of the region’s stellar Chenin Blancs, but perfumed enough to set itself apart from them, too. We had it with cold langoustines and mayo, and: wow.

The name, these days, needs no introduction: at the Lambs Conduit Street original and now in their fancy new (but very old) digs in Soho, Noble Rot has become a byword for what co-founders Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew would no doubt term “wine from another galaxy”.

To start with, this does, of course, mean the heaviest of heavy hitters: names like Roulot, Chave, Mugnier, Tempier and Rinaldi are central to the Western European canon, and central to the list here, often at benevolently eyebrow-raising markups.

But for the majority of drinkers those wines are once-in-a-lifetime indulgences, and it’s at slightly lower prices where Noble Rot really sets itself apart from the also-rans: Argyros’ luminous ‘Barrel Fermented’ Assyrtiko for £59, a decade-old Gravonia from Lopez de Heredia for £60, and Alan Graillot’s Crozes-Hermitage for £67 all offer punters a chance to drink a genuinely special bottle of wine at a less-than-ruinous price.

So seamlessly has Alex Jackson set up shop in the kitchen of what used to be The Gay Hussar, it’s almost easy to overlook how outstanding the food here is, too. There are nods to the venue’s historical Hungarian heritage – before you’ve even sat down, order a round of the duck liver choux buns with Tokaji jelly for the table – but the dish that looms largest is the chicken with cream, morels and Vin Jaune that has already become a Noble Rot Soho signature. The grows-together-goes-together axiom would suggest something from the Jura – I see you, magnum of 1990 Domaine Rolet Arbois Poulsard Vieilles Vignes – but limiting yourself to such specificity when there are such abundant and exciting alternatives seems borderline boorish. Jaboulet’s Hermitage ‘La Chapelle’ from the same vintage for a mere £683? Next time, perhaps.

Comando G, Sierra de Gredos La Bruja de Rozas, Castilla y Leon, Spain 2020 (£53)

Fun – just really, really fun. Fruity, crunchy Garnacha but so much more than that, too: tiresome natty bros reaching for adjectives like “smashable”, shame on you. There’s a special fragrance that good strawberries get in the height of summer: close your eyes and that’s the direction it takes you. A vino de pueblo in name alone.

A Perret, Condrieu Coteau de Chery, Northern Rhône, France 2007 (£126)

A hillside vineyard so beloved by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Probus that he spared it whilst forcing the Gauls to replant the surrounding land: everyone loves wine with a story, and Perret’s top-drawer Condrieu has one of the best (probably apocryphal) stories going. Now 15 years old and probably at the peak of its powers – the domaine’s own tasting notes suggest it would partner perfectly with “a plump fattened chicken with cream”. Like, say, a celebrated dish of chicken with morels, Vin Jaune and cream? It would be a shame not to, really.

It reads like bad parody, something a crusty broadsheet columnist would conjure up in a moment of total creative destitution: of course London is host to the UK’s first dedicated orange and skin contact wine bar, and of course it’s in Hackney.

But there’s a way of doing this that is cliquey and exclusionary, and then there’s the way Silver Lining does it. Call it educating, call it simplifying, call it sharing a passion for something unique and worthy of its own dedicated platform: whatever you call it, Silver Lining is the single best place in town to learn about a tradition that traces its way back across two thousand years. Even the pricing is democratic: with wine from just £5 per glass on its celebrated Orange Wednesdays, it is easy for repeat visitors to build up the sort of sense-memory for different styles that we really mean when we commend someone on their “palate”.

True Gravner-heads know that these wines – some floral, some bracingly sinewy – can withstand pretty much anything a kitchen can throw at them: across town, at Kol, a predominantly Eastern European list is demonstrating how seamlessly Santiago Lastra’s high-acid, spicy food melds with Slobodné Vinárstvo’s gorgeous amber cuvees. Here, the offer is more traditional cave à manger fare – cheeses, charcuterie, tinned seafood – which positions Silver Lining as a perfect spot for a pre-prandial apero ahead of hitting up Peg or Lagom nearby. Then again, you could always get a bottle of Radikon’s Slatnik to go and a sandwich from Banh Mi Hoi-An: an only-in-Hackney fantasy pairing fit for a king.

Staffelter Hof, Little Bastard, Germany (£60)

At the far left of the orange wine spectrum, this blend of Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Muller Thurgau and Muscat spends only a handful of hours on the skins (with the exception of the Muscat, which they macerate for a day or two). The net result is zippy from the Riesling and a tiny bit spritzig, with some Perry-like aromatics and a killer, just-one-more-sip finish. It’s a mainstay in natural wine circles, and for good reason: a perfect introduction to the interesting stuff that happens when people (in this case winemaker Jan Klein, the latest at the helm of a multi-generational dynasty) think creatively about their craft.

Fattoria Di Sammonata, Primo Fuoco Bianco (£64)

My personal, tedious take on orange wine is if you’re going to make an orange wine, make it really fucking orange — leave ‘em in there so long the end result is so bone-dry and tannic the idea it was made from white grapes is basically laughable. So: I really, really like this 100% trebbiano, which spends three month on skins and as a consequence has those wonderful, Christmassy notes of caramelised orange and toasted nuts. It might not be to everyone’s taste, but to anyone looking to dive in feet-first, this is well worth a look.

Unlike Sessions Arts Club, the other contender for best new restaurant of last year – a critics’ darling that felt hand-carved from Carrara marble and dressed in luxuriant baize – Planque is spiky. The location is easy to miss, half-buried under a railway arch. The room is an elongated box of glass and steel; seating is hard wood, not soft fabric. And Sebastian Myers’ food resists easy characterisation: is it Modern Austro-French? Postmodern British? Bistronomie passed through a series of funhouse mirrors until words like “Yves Camdeborde” and “La Régalade” lose all meaning?

If this all sounds deliberately challenging – the restaurant as academic exercise, or art installation – don’t be deterred. The food is interesting, different, cerebral even – but it’s also absolutely delicious, clever not for the sake of being clever but because being clever is sometimes how you come up with the best ideas. Dishes like clams with savagnin butter, or calf’s brain on toast with black pepper sauce, or a simple-looking but endlessly satisfying bowl of squid rice reflect both thought and skill on the part of the kitchen; the perfect mini-baguette that accompanies the cheese board demonstrates how readily they can knock out OG French classiques too.

There’s a similar blend of the traditional and the eclectic in founder Jonathan Alphandery’s obsessively compiled cellar. Regions of France elevated to prestige over the past couple of decades are especially well represented – there’s plenty of Jura chardonnay and chenin from the Loire – but there’s also room for the new (new) French wine: There can’t be many lists in London with a better selection of whites and reds from Savoie; nor can there be many that better spotlight small, artisanal operations in Champagne and Burgundy.

Good wine is perhaps even more at the heart of Planque than good food: club members can store their collection on site, and while you don’t need a membership to get a table, early access to the reservation line for Planque’s regular winemaker events and tastings make signing up an enticing prospect for the serious cork dork.

François Dumas Condrieu, Northern Rhône, France, 2017 (£93)

I’ve thrown Jura Chardonnay and Loire Chenin at the top two-thirds of the menu at Planque and both worked beautifully, but Dumas’ Condrieu was something else entirely. All the usual viognier notes but not enervated or otiose like highly perfumed wines can sometimes be — just totally vibrant and sui generis. Not cheap, clearly, but capable of making any evening into a special occasion.

It takes the conviction of the true fanatic to attempt to sell Italian sparkling wine in a city in the midst of a years-long backlash against the evils wrought by supermarket prosecco. And yet Luca Dusi – the boundlessly effervescent genius loci behind Shoreditch’s Passione Vino – possesses just that conviction (the clue’s in the name he chose for the place). There is, of course, more on offer than the fizzy stuff, but in foregrounding Lambrusco, Franciacorta and Col Fondo for an audience more accustomed to glugging La Gioiosa in an Aperol Spritz, Dusi is starting the capital on the long road to recovery.

Fortunately, education has seldom felt so fun. In a converted townhouse attired in the interior design equivalent of Jared Leto’s performance in House of Gucci, Dusi and co lead customers on a merry dance through some intriguingly idiosyncratic – and, in some cases, genuinely exclusive – Italianate imports. Ancestral method fizz, cloudy as the Venetian lagoon; igneous Etna Bianco (an appellation slowly working its way onto more London lists, but which almost certainly got its start here); Skerk’s justly celebrated oranges; a host of lesser-known Barolos – it’s all on the table, and introduced with verve and, yes, passion by Dusi and team. Don’t overlook a short, all-killer-no-filler food menu, too, which skews towards the Veneto with dishes like baccalà on grilled polenta and milk-braised cardoons, and which further sells the wholly believable fantasy that you’ve been transported to one of La Grande Bellezza’s more debauched revelries.

Malibràn, Sottoriva Col Fondo, NV (£46/magnum retail)

Malibràn’s ancestral method sparkler has become something of a calling card for Passione Vino – it’s the first thing I ever drank there, and a breathtaking rebuke to the idea that all prosecco is sweet and uninteresting. As happy with fatty cuts of salume as it is with salt cod or fritto misto, this is the versatility and diversity of Italian wine at the heart of the Passione Vino project writ large; so show someone you care with a magnum.

Three sites and two evolutions in, Manteca 3.0 is a flame-breathing Charizard of a restaurant, a sprawling bruiser of a place rippling with confidence and brawn. The through-lines from the original Heddon Street site are there: The house-made salumi (especially the obscene mortadella) is possibly the best in town; the pastas are on point; the snacks – don’t miss the pig skin ragu with a cloudlike chicharron – read beautifully and eat even better.

But there’s a new sense of scale to this version of the restaurant. Physically, given the place’s larger footprint, but philosophically, too: the room is a low-lit stunner, the open-plan kitchen looks a million bucks, and presentation (not least the Insta-famous rigatoni with a vivid, verdant kale sauce) is clearly front of mind.

Fittingly, with somewhere with such a clear sense of ambition, the wine programme has also taken a big step up, too: a lengthy list offers selections under the headings of ‘a classic choice’ and ‘down the rabbit hole…’ and in both verticals there is plenty to note. A lot of it is Italian, reflecting Manteca’s origins and influence, but there are also picks from the likes of Momento Mori in Australia, Blankbottle Winery in South Africa, and Borja Perez in Tenerife.

Simply put, it’s impossible to imagine any two people navigating the same path through a list like this, and every decision represents an almost metaphysical act of introspection: Michel Gonet or Tillingham Wines? Classical Burgundy or Blankbottle’s bonkers Orbitofrontal Cortex? Brunello di Montalcino, or Domaine La Calmette’s glorious Butte Rouge from Cahors? It’s the wine list as Rorschach test, and it’s the cherry on top of a truly exciting cake. Tuck in.

Quentin Harel, Morgon Les Charmes, 2020 (£55)

Young winemaker + gamay + Morgon = a perfect married couple date night wine, the sort of thing that will complement pretty much anything on the menu but also give you something to talk about in its own right.

La Stoppa, Macchiona, 2013 (£78)

Brooding and almost Bordelais at times, this 50/50 Barbera/Bonarda blend would be a very good friend to some of the richer pastas on offer, and especially the must-order duck with sausage. The Barbera brings Haribo-esque sour cherry; two years in oak botti mellow things out nicely but this is still a big, carnal beast. A modern classic of Italian winemaking for a menu long on modern Italian classics.