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Neville Blech
After qualifying as a Chartered Accountant, Neville
Blech spent two years broaching his wine knowledge
in Italy. On his return to England he spent some
years as a partner in an accountancy practice
whilst continuing to broaden his wine knowledge
in both theory and practice. In 1974, he and his
talented wife Sonia, opened a "restaurant
with rooms” in the Wye Valley, which also
became the first Michelin starred restaurant in
Wales with Sonia being the first woman chef to
gain a Michelin star in the UK. On returning to
London in 1980, they opened the highly acclaimed
Mijanou Restaurant in Ebury Street, where Neville
became the first winner of the Wine List of the
Year competition, sponsored by Wines of Spain,
in 1988. In 1996 they were made "an offer
they couldn't refuse” for the restaurant
and Neville then continued to build up his wine
importing business, The Wine Treasury, which specialised
in wines from California and Italy. This was sold
in 2002 and he now concentrates on developing
www.bacchusandcomus.co.uk
- a website for the gastronomically washed - writing,
consulting and organising wine tours and dinners. |
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The top 100 UK restaurant wine lists by
Neville Blech
Imagine this situation. You are hosting a lunch or dinner
at a well-known restaurant in the area and you are confronted
with the wine list. You want to get on with enjoying your
time, be it with family, friends or business colleagues, and
you find that you may have to plough through a hundred, two
hundred, three hundred or even more wines (sometimes many
more). You desperately need to make a quick decision on your
wine choices so do you (a) go for the cheapest House wine,
even if you know that it’s going to taste like you’ve licked
the backs of a thousand envelopes, (b) ask the sommelier for
advice (assuming there is one) and hope that he or she is
not going to recommend something which is way beyond your
budget, (c) go for something safe like Sancerre or a well
known claret that you can either afford, or if the company’s
paying, something that will suitably impress, or (d) try to
go it alone and choose something that you think will be interesting
and good value?
 What
should you be looking for? Well, unless you are on a strict
budget, the first thing you should be looking for is quality.
Does this restaurant have a good selection of quality wines?
And if so, are there any such wines that demand attention
as being value for money? Apart from the obvious top clarets
and Burgundies there are many places in the world today where
great wine is produced and we look to the enterprising restaurateur
for a list which is quality driven all round, innovative and
exciting. Does the restaurant have an interesting selection
of half-bottles? If so, I, for one, would be delighted to
forego a bottle of wine with the meal for three halves! Does
the restaurant have an interesting selection of dry wines
by the glass to allow me to experiment? (And I don’t mean
the cheapest House red and white the proprietor can lay his
hands on). Is the list an easy read, with helpful tasting
notes (geared to the cuisine and not to some wine merchant’s
blather), or is there a helpful and knowledgeable sommelier
to guide you through it?
From time to time, we will put under the microscope a wine
list which we feel will make it worth your while to visit
a restaurant which is worth going to JUST FOR THE WINE LIST
ON ITS OWN. We’ll take the headache and the heartache out
of deciding how and where to find wines which are good quality
and good value in other words an odyssey to discover wines
that merit the best price/quality ratio. This sometimes means
picking through a list and finding these wines when most other
wines on the list would never qualify in a million years.
Don’t be put off by a list that seems excessively expensive
deep down within most of them are hidden bargains and we
are here to bring them to your attention.
To begin this occasional series, we draw your attention to
Tate Restaurant's fabulous wine
list
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