Perfect wine list? Nicholas Lander gives The Buyer his top 10 tips
Nick Lander.
You would expect the FT’s restaurant critic of 25-plus years and founder of the legendary Soho eatery, L’Escargot to know a good menu when he sees one.
When you consider that he is also one half of the most perfect food/wine pairings in the business, you can be sure he does. For Nicholas Lander – aka. Mr. Jancis Robinson MW – dining out is quite literally a living.
So here are Lander’s top 10 tips to setting the perfect wine list
- Relatively short but with a good range.
- An excellent array of wines by the glass.
- The use of a Coravin system to allow expensive wines to be sold by the glass.
- A good range of sherries and champagnes.
- A good cocktail list – so the extra profit generated will mean you can offer lower margins on the wines.
- A good range of non-alcoholic drinks including a non-alcoholic beer – very thirst quenching!
- The presence of a really obscure wine, or a wine from an obscure part of the world, that means that the owner or sommelier has a strong reason for including it on their list.
- A list that includes some wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy.
- Wines paired with certain dishes.
- An interesting range of dessert wines and ports by the glass.
So, agree with Lander on his top 10?
Think there’s any other top tips?
Spotted anyone doing a wine list in a different way (hopefully yourself!)
Leave your comments in the Leave a Reply box below.
Also below and reproduced in full is one wine list from Charlie Bird, New York City, that gets printed in Lander’s new book On the Menu because it is an exemplary wine list.
Nicholas Lander’s new book On The Menu (Unbound, £30 hardback) was released in hardback in November 2016.
The book is a celebration of the history, design and evolution of the menu. It is an expertly curated collection of menus from leading restaurants around the globe, sumptuously presented in a coffee table format.
A sequel to Lander’s first book The Art of the Restaurateur, it studies the principles of devising a menu, from selecting the dishes, wines and cocktails, to the design and layout of the physical menu, with a dedicated chapter on drinks menus.
