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THE BEST RETAIL WINE LIST IN LONDON

Dodge the tourists wandering around Fortnum & Mason's food hall, and head to the wine bar in the basement, writes Tim Atkin. An oenophilic hush pervades 1707, where patrons can sample from the 1,200-bottle wine-list ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008.

Fortnum & Mason has mastered the art of packaging and selling comestible England. Judging by the accents of the people wandering through its premises, happy to pay over the odds for tea, fruitcake and Burlington breakfast marmalade, most of its customers are tourists. Shopping there feels a bit like visiting the duty free area at Heathrow, give or take the interminable delays.

The Englishness of the food hall--some of the assistants even wear tails--obscures one very important fact: Fortnum & Mason has one of the best retail wine lists in London, with 1,200 bottles sourced from all over the world. Its prices are surprisingly keen, especially when compared with the likes of Harrods and Selfridges; it has an excellent selection of own labels; and in Tim French it has a young, fresh-faced buyer who has transformed the fusty image of Fortnum's wine department.

You don't have to visit the store to buy its wines. Fortnum & Mason has a website and will deliver for a one-off charge of £7. It also operates a case discount of 8%. But if you do go to Piccadilly, you can now drink as well as look at the bottles. Since October 2006 Fortnum & Mason has had its own wine bar, called 1707, where diners can try wines from the main retail list for an extra £10 (plus 12.5% service charge). This is not an entirely new concept--Vinoteca and Green & Blue got there first in London--but it is nonetheless welcome for that, especially in St James's, which is prime rip-off territory.

The bar itself, separated from the wine department by a pair of slightly forbidding cage doors, is stylish, even if it is something of a mixed metaphor, design-wise: brick vaults, wooden, log cabin-style panels on the walls and dangling black lamps. Appropriately, the wines are the focus of the room, housed inside a temperature-controlled steel and glass cube. I suspect that no one goes to 1707 for the atmosphere or the rather predictable, tapas-style food, but if you want to drink some very good wines at more than reasonable prices, head for Fortnum's basement.

There are two ways to buy here: the first is to visit the wine department and pick something off the shelf yourself; the second is to order one of the wine flights from a waiter. These are presented on a stainless steel tree in a trio of 125ml glasses. In price order, they are themed as rosé (£10.25), lunch (£11), Alsace (£13.50), Pinot Noir (£13.75), Chardonnay (£14), Sauvignon (£14.50), Australian (£15), Syrah/Shiraz (£16) and celebration (£34). All of these are available by the single 175cl serving too, as part of a by-the-glass selection of 50 wines.

The flights are generally well chosen and avoid obvious selections. I tried the Pinot Noir and Syrah/Shiraz flights and, in each case, liked two of the three choices. The 2005 Fortnum & Mason Bourgogne Rouge from Drouhin, the 2006 Santa Maria Pinot Noir, Au Bon Climat, the 2006 Crozes-Hermitage, Les Meysonniers, Chapoutier and the 2006 Fortnum & Mason Barossa Shiraz from Torbreck are all great examples of what they are supposed to be, but I found both the 2005 Pegasus Bay Waipara Pinot Noir and the 2001 Il Bosco Syrah, Luigi D'Alessandro clunky and over-extracted. Nonetheless, this is an interesting and inexpensive way to try a bracket of wines.

If this is one of 1707's USPS the other is access to such a large and varied range of wines, with particular strengths in fizz, red Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Loire, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria and Sherry. Prices in the wine department range from £6.90 for the 2005 Fortnum's Côtes du Rhône to £2,950 for 1990 DRC La Tâche, so you've got a wide choice.

You'll also find an impressive selection of half bottles, for which you pay only £5 corkage at 1707. My only gripe about buying the more expensive wines on the list is that you will be charged 12.5% service on top of the bottle and corkage price, but this is common to most restaurants in Britain.

1707 is a great idea that doesn't quite work at the moment, largely because of its subterranean location. Once the main store is closed, the exit runs past the toilets and emerges in the middle of another restaurant, the Fountain. As things stand, it's worth going to 1707 to plunder Fortnum's excellent list, but located on another floor and given a more adventurous menu, this would be a destination venue for wine lovers.

1707 at Fortnum & Mason 181 Piccadilly, London W1. +44 (0)20 7734 8040

IN THE BIN

Number of wines: 1,200

By the glass: 50

Under £30: 302

Over £100: 165

Best value: 2005 Louis Carillon Puligny-Montrachet £48.50

Worst value: None: all are competitively priced

Picture credit: Sam Barker (of Tim Atkin)

(Tim Atkin is a Master of Wine. In his last piece for Intelligent Life he checked out the wine list at the Fat Duck.)

autumn 2008  Food & Drink  THE WINE INSPECTOR