The Wine Hit List, Summer 2022 Edition: Veraison, Half Cut, Bright, and More

It feels a little excessive to credit the Top Cuvée team with fundamentally altering London’s wine taste, but only a little. Before they came along, “shitty wine memes” was a phrase only associated with the (very funny) Instagram account of the same name; since then, they’ve exposed an entire demographic to the delights of a certain style of light, alarmingly drinkable vin de soif, most obviously epitomised in the form of Chin Chin, a vinho verde imported by Keeling Andrew Co.

Last summer, they were apparently shipping a pallet of the stuff a week to Team Cuvée – testament to a very 2020s kind of social media virality. Evidence, too, of how the populist and the well-made are not mutually exclusive: at every price point on the Cuvée spectrum, there are serious, high-quality wines to be enjoyed – and nowhere better than at the new(ish) Cave Cuvée in Bethnal Green, where the usual bangers come with a side of oysters, charcuterie, or pâté en croûte. Keep an eye open for occasional subterranean collaborations, too – if the ongoing pop-up within Yard Sale Pizza is any indication, they’ll represent one of the hottest tickets in town.

Offbeat Wines, Field Notes 1, Pinot Noir / Pinot Blanc blend (£28 retail)

The first of two selections that debunk the idea that all Top Cuvée do is smashable meme wines, this rosé from the formerly unheralded terroir of rural Wiltshire is like a mini-treatise on the delicacy and delight of the two grapes that go into it.  It’s far from assertive but after a bit of time in the glass there’s a lovely, soft-edged strawberries-and-cream perfume and just enough bite to keep you coming back for another sip. Will get absolutely steamrollered by some of the saltier, meatier stuff on the menu so order accordingly – perhaps one best to enjoy by itself over the course of an hour or so, letting it tell its story in its own quiet way.

Selvadolce, Crescendo, Pigato, 2020 (£33.25 retail)

I like to think you can taste the sea in coastal wines: that burst of ozone and salinity you get when a wave breaks and the spray carries on the wind. Selvadolce’s vines grow in the shadow of the French border, a couple of miles from the Ligurian sea; its Pigato – a local dialect term for “freckled”, denoting the mottled skin that putatively differentiates it from its maybe-cousin-maybe-twin vermentino – is floral and savoury and, yes, just that little bit salty. Budget permitting, get one bottle to drink now and one to open further down the line – I had the 2016 late last summer and it was a revelation.

Anywhere with former Quality Wines bottle whisperer Gus Gluck’s seal of approval is well worth checking out, and this new venture from a collective of bright young things amply repays any curiosity. For the wine dork, Noble Rot alumna Holly Willcocks is a particular draw: her list is cherry-picked from a murderer’s row of London’s best-loved importers and suppliers, and she can talk you through every selection with the passion and expertise of a true enthusiast. Or perhaps that should be “evangelist”: you get a sense that Willcocks sees it as her role to gently mould tastes, to nudge people down the road less travelled – the dark rose, not the pale one; the aligoté, not the chardonnay – all the while providing the safety blanket of old favourites (Chin Chin, present and correct) to those who just want to drink something familiar.

The Half Cut crew have not, to date, been permitted to install any extraction, meaning the food generally consists of cheeses, tinned seafood, charcuterie and salads, although there are occasionally ingenious work-arounds (bruleed goat’s cheese on toast, yes please) – frequent collaborations with the likes of Hot 4 U and Spasia Dinkovski’s cult Mystic Börek will also keep even the most assiduous regulars on their toes. An idiosyncratic selection of beers, ciders, cocktails and softs rounds out the experience – one that feels personally curated in the best possible way.

Fitz Wine, Sov’ran Ortega, 2018 (£29 to drink in, £21 to take away)

Fitz Wine is a Sussex-based winery that sources its grapes from a network of growers across the UK – most of them go into Charmat-method / prosecco-style sparkling wines which make for a nice alternative to the usual more biscuity Champagne-esque stuff produced on these shores. Sov’ran, on the other hand, is something much more idiosyncratic: a bracingly fresh, strikingly floral wine that in a recent domestic (random Tuesday night) tasting more than held its own against gai yang and som tam.

Willcocks suggested it when I mentioned I was on something of a Riesling kick; like some Rieslings, it’s a lovely aperitif that gets even better when introduced to the sort of stuff most people feel like eating around 6PM – a gilda, some crisps, a somewhat immoderate amount of cured meat. In other words, a fittingly left-field choice to enjoy somewhere that relishes taking the road less travelled.

You will, of course, recall Glasgow indie darlings Life Without Buildings, and their not-quite-hit, all-time-banger ‘PS Exclusive’, from 2000’s Any Other City. Most notably, you will remember the way lead singer Sue Tompkins intones the words “the right stuff” no fewer than forty-six times in the course of the song’s four minutes and sixteen seconds, bludgeoning the phrase into utter semantic submission and resurrecting it into glorious significance over, and over, and over again.

The right stuff, the right stuff, the right stuff: this is Hector’s, Summer 2022, a compendium of all the little bits and pieces that transform a collection of tables and chairs and bottles and glasses into a place that has Vibes. Not for nothing is it a storied industry hangout: it’s the way the light hits those walls and that colour palette of honeyed sienna; it’s the cute, diminutive terrace reclaimed from the pavement; it’s the slightly random location in fancy De Beauvoir.

It has personality, basically – a sense of identity even though many of the bottles on the shelves can be found elsewhere in town, even though it is far from the only place doing a short menu of largely room-temperature fare. I think of Judy Rodgers, of Zuni Café fame, and her aphorism: “A truly good meal depends on a cavalcade of sound judgments, many of which occur well before you lift a knife.” Sound judgments abound on the menu at Hector’s, which remains a masterclass in the art of stoking desire in the reader without offering a single plate of hot food: who could read the words “Crisps + Serrano” or “Tortilla + Alioli” and not want to dive in with both feet? Who could resist a selection of Spanish conservas that have been casually, winningly rebranded as “tins”?

The wine’s also great (you knew that by now anyway), but in a sense it doesn’t matter: this place could be serving Nicki Minaj’s Myx Fusions Moscato and we’d all still make a beeline. The right stuff, the right stuff, the right stuff.

Bodegas Ameztoi, ‘Rubentis’, Txakoli Rosado, 2021 (£18 to go, £33 to drink in)

In the States, this wine has earned cult status – ‘A Rosé So Divine They Call It Baby Jesus’ reads the adulatory headline of a breathless Punch profile from last year. Perhaps its relative lack of scarcity on these shores has prevented it from being similarly prized over here, because really, at this price, there isn’t a better pink wine out there: it’s a low-alcohol, high-acid bombshell that makes a mockery of the anodyne, pallid dreck the vignerons of Provence have foisted on unsuspecting Brits for decades, with just a hint of spritz to boot. This year’s Chin Chin? In a just world, it just might be.

Of all the neo-caves that have recently opened in the capital, Veraison in Camberwell feels the most classically French. Is it the slightly more formal wooden tables and chairs? The elegant shelving, also wooden? The cute little corner kitchen that doubles as checkout for your to-go purchases?

Peut-être – they all contribute to the vibe, a little older and less hypebeast-y. But really the wine tells this story even more eloquently – sure, there are the requisite pét-nats for those so inclined, but there are definitely fewer funky skin contact numbers, and there’s more representation from traditional Old World powerhouses: Burgundy, Champagne, Tuscany. The food, too, is not inclined to frippery: one bonkers salami and raclette toastie aside, it’s straightforwardly delicious stuff like rillettes, pâté and charcuterie.

This isn’t to suggest for a second that Veraison is hidebound, or boring. It’s just a slightly different good time – somewhere you could take your mum as well as your partner, your dad as well as your mates. A clear analogue in the centre of town is Winemakers Club, which tracks: owner Patrycja Lorek is married to Winemakers’ John Baum; she has also previously worked at Bubbledogs and 10 Cases, both of which show a similar flair for excavating interesting finds from the soils of well-established regions. There are, of course, plenty of good places to drink great wine south of the river. But this still feels like a statement opening.

Tenuta di Trinoro, Le Cupole, 2017 (£48 to go, £60 to drink in)

All the opulence of top-notch Bordeaux – as you might expect from a Bordeaux-ish blend – with some of the thrilling bite that characterises the great wines of Tuscany, this is a best-case scenario for what happens when two winemaking cultures collide. Perhaps not one for high, high summer, but when the heat of the day begins to fade, this has the warmth and scale of sunset on the Val d’Orcia. Especially good with the more robust, meatier fare on offer.

They call it Stendahl syndrome, or Florence syndrome: the feeling of being utterly overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the object, or objects, in front of you – so much so it begins to take physical effect. In an era of influencer make-up ranges and Instagram filters, “beauty” has somewhat lost its meaning, but Sessions Arts Club increasingly feels like a project pursuing the term in its 19^th century, Romantic sense to its ultimate, transcendental conclusion.

The room, of course, is stunning – easily the most beautiful in the city. But Florence Knight’s food, too, is beautiful, which is not the same as saying it’s delicious (although it’s often that as well) – it looks lovely, and tastes likes it looks: elegant and delicate. Take a dish of scallops, radish and jasmine; or a pudding in which a strawberry sorbet garnished with elderflowers is topped off with a generous glug of champagne – dazzling visually, but also so distinctive to eat, pushing food into the realm of the purely olfactory.

All of which makes the challenge of assembling Sessions’ wine list so singular. Go in with the usual selection of central London people pleasers and you risk running through a flower garden in Wellington boots; go too timid and allow the food to take centre stage and you risk betraying Sessions Arts Club’s raison d’être. Molly Steemson, though, has threaded the needle with a selection that meets Knight’s floral, perfumed cooking with perfume of its own: world-class Chardonnays, aged white Rioja; opulent red Burgundy; honeyed, tropical Jurançon Moelleux. It’s the final piece in the puzzle, and it makes Sessions Arts Club a truly coherent and enduring aesthetic statement. As those Romantics knew all too well, a thing of beauty truly is a joy forever.

La Stoppa, Ageno, Emilia-Romagna, 2017 (£85)

I brought a bottle of Lopez de Heredia’s storied Gran Reserva Rosado to our most recent dinner at Sessions: one of the cult wines of the world, with a reputation to match. In all honesty, this kicked its ass for the half an hour or so they were on the table together: as an articulation of the cool things that can happen when you blur the boundaries between red and white wine, sure, but mainly as a glass of something you keep coming back to. A month on the skins results in a colour to which ‘orange’ doesn’t really do justice and an incredible, concentrated nose; in the glass it’s like sucking barley sugars, lemon drops and pear drops in one diabolical, delightful mouthful. A future classic from a winery that can seemingly do no wrong.

Bright right now is in that most coveted of places: what sportsmen call the zone, what psychologists call a flow state, what more colloquially might be called bossing it, crushing it, killing it.

It’s not just the fact that the food is better than ever, with a quantifiably perfect division between snacks, small plates, pastas and larger sharing dishes on the menu and genuine wizardry in the kitchen. It’s not just the way the service carries itself with the ease and confidence of people accustomed to making customers feel perfectly content. It’s not the room, which is a wonderful cocoon during colder months but really comes into its own when the sun comes out and the border between dining room, bar and outdoor terrace becomes perfectly porous. And it’s not the wine list, which remains a treatise on all things low intervention worth your attention.

Instead, it’s pure synthesis, a whole that’s still somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts. A snack of fried skate topped with boquerones, paired with a glass of Quarticello’s giddily effervescent Despina is, on paper, just some battered fish and sparkling wine. But it pingpongs you from seaside holidays in the UK, to an early evening tapa in Barcelona, to a plate of perfect fritto misto by the Tyrrhenian sea – Bright’s sun-soaked, Southwest European mission statement in a nutshell. Duck agnolotti with roasting juices proves the standard doesn’t slip once things become more substantial – a spritz of rosemary vinaigrette lends an almost insouciant grace note to top things off. And puddings remain among London’s most fundamentally satisfying. Sometimes with these things it’s best not to overanalyse – better to just sit back and bear witness to lightning being captured in a bottle. Book, go, have fun. It’s not rocket science.

Camillo Donati, Ribelle, Barbera, 2019 (£48)

Of course the fun of a list like Bright’s is going with a big group of friends and trying as much different stuff as possible, culminating in an impulse purchase way out of everyone’s price range that becomes the stuff of bleary-eyed legend the next day. But Bright is also a great place for a lowkey date night, or casual weekend lunch. On these occasions, multiple bottles might not be appropriate, and so you need an all-rounder to carry you (and max. one accomplice) through the whole menu. This is the call: light and fizzy enough to avoid bludgeoning seafood early on; dry enough to play nicely with saltier, fattier, meatier fare, and with enough red fruit and body to partner with most of the pastas. Of course, all of these qualities mean it could fit in pretty much anywhere in the piece if you are going with a larger group – win-win!

Sylvain Pataille, Bourgogne Aligoté, 2020 (£61, £10.5 by the glass)

One section of the Bright menu I seem to overlook at least half the time is the selection of larger sharing dishes right down at the bottom. This usually features a couple of big hunks of meat for the more rapacious carnivores, as well as something typically exquisite involving fish. At the moment, it’s steamed seabass with ginger and a fresh garlic and butter sauce – and Sylvain Pataille, a man leading the re-evaluation of the long-untrendy, borderline-punchline varietal Aligoté, may have inadvertently produced a perfect partner. Briny as an oyster, tart as a Granny Smith, and with enough substance to stand up to all that butter – white Burgundy, even Aligoté, doesn’t come cheap, but this still feels like a total bargain.