A growing number of UK restaurants, from KOL in London to Bavette in Leeds, are creating their own wines in collaboration with well-known makers to offer diners something unique.
Keen to elevate house wine from its cheap and nasty reputation, savvy restaurateurs are partnering with winemakers around the globe to create limited-edition bottlings.
Nose-to-tail venue St. John in Clerkenwell has long flown the flag for high-end house wines and offers a range of own-label drops from across France, including a premier cru from Beaune, a Champagne, and its much-loved St. John Claret, made by Bordeaux’s Sichel family.
Spice king Ottolenghi offers a red and white blend at his restaurants that is the fruit of a collaboration with the organic estate Krásná Hora in South Moravia. Italian restaurant
Trullo in Islington makes its own Chianti, and Sri Lankan venue Paradise in Soho bottles a Mosel Riesling called Paradies made by natural winemaker Jan Mathias Klein at Staffelter Hof.
KOL's high-end approach
At KOL, Santiago Lastra’s
Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant in London’s Marylebone, head sommelier Anthony Gopal is powering through magnums of Hecatomb, the Burgenland Cabernet Franc he and Lastra co-created with cult natural winemaker Christian Tschida.
Having tested the water with a quartet of own-label wines from Slovakian producer Slobodne, for his second act, Gopal joined forces with Tschida in Austria to produce a single barrel of Cabernet Franc named ‘Hecatomb’, meaning ‘sacrifice’. Bottled as 200 magnums, the wine boasts a striking label featuring the skull of an Aztec warrior and a red wax seal.
For Gopal, the motivation to make the wine came down to two things: identity and control. “We work with producers that embody and represent our ethos,” he told
db. “It’s also about how tightly you can control the experience and production. We work closely with our food suppliers for traceability, so why wouldn’t you do the same thing with wine?”
Cabernet Franc was chosen due to how well it works with Lastra’s dishes, and the wine is currently being paired with lamb saddle and mole coloradito on KOL’s tasting menu.
“Christian’s style for his reds tends to be lighter extraction and a dark fruit flavour profile without heavy tannin, overt oak, or too much structure that would be offensive to a menu that features chilli consistently,” said Gopal, who doesn’t view the project as a ‘house’ wine.
“Hecatomb isn’t a house wine. We wanted it to be a high-quality limited offering. We’ll be collaborating with other winemakers, focusing on aromatic varieties grown in parts of the world that still represent great value. We’ll probably do a couple of these projects a year.”
Making use of surplus wine
Some own-label projects are helping to find a home for wine that would otherwise go to waste. Last year, Shoreditch meat Mecca Smokestak launched an own-label, whole bunch fermented blend of Mourvèdre, Cinsault and Syrah made by Swartland star Jurgen Gouws.
The wine was sourced by Angelo van Dyk, founder of the Wasted Wine Club, who works with small-scale winemakers with excess stock on their hands to find creative ways of turning wine that may otherwise go to waste into limited edition bottlings for restaurants.
Other own-label wines are being created off the back of diner demand. Noble Rot’s house white Chin Chin; a Vinho Verde from Portugal featuring a sock-wearing devil on the label, proved such a success that founders Mark Andrew and Dan Keeling added a house red called Don Tinto to their range made from organically-farmed Tempranillo grown near Toledo.
At
neighbourhood bistro Bavette in Leeds, an own-label wine was a no-brainer, given co-owner Clément Cousin hails from a winemaking family in Anjou. The resulting Cuvée Bavette, which made its debut last November, was crafted from Cabernet Franc grown at his father Olivier Cousin’s biodynamic farm near the Loire Valley village of Martigné-Briand.
Like Smokestak, the fruit-forward red, which is made in the Beaujolais semi-carbonic maceration style, solved the problem of what to do with an excess of grapes from the abundant 2023 vintage. With full tanks, Olivier decided to make a one-off cuvée.
“Having a wine made exclusively for us is a great story to tell to our team and customers. It’s something to be proud of that you don't find in many restaurants,” Cousin told
db. “The idea was to create an easy-drinking red that would be a great pairing for our food,” he added.
Like Gopal at KOL, Cousin is keen to highlight the difference between Cuvée Bavette and traditional house wines. “It’s not our house wine in the sense that it’s the cheapest. It’s our ‘vin de la maison’, as it’s made by my family. I hope projects like this will help to differentiate house wines that are the cheapest on the list from wines made by or for the restaurant.”
Brothers Sam and Eddie Hart, who count iconic tapas venue Barrafina and Quo Vadis in Soho among their 14 London venues, were early to the own-label wine party, bottling their Hart Bros manzanilla en rama over a decade ago in collaboration with Jerez bodega Hidalgo.
Having started as a side project that allowed Sam to pursue his passion for wine, their own-label range has since expanded to include a Galician Albariño, a rosé from Navarra, a juicy Garnacha from Madrid, and a soon-to-be-released crianza made by Rioja icon Muga.
Unique wines for customer experience
“We thought it would be fun to do our own wines to give us something unique to offer our customers,” Sam Hart told
db. “We’re about to launch our first Rioja made by Muga. We’re good friends and fans of everything they do. The wine hits the sweet spot between oak-driven traditional Rioja and fruit-forward modern styles, which is what our customers love.”
All of the Hart Bros wines are “several price points above” where a house wine would sit on a menu. “We didn’t want to be price sensitive with these wines - our Albariño is £67 a bottle. It was more important to find wines that we love and can get excited about,” Hart said.
“We want to offer our customers something delicious and good value, and by importing the wines direct and ordering multiple palettes a year, you can get a good price for it,” he added.
