We’re Hunting Down Britain’s Best Restaurants... To Judge Their Wine Lists?

We’re Hunting Down Britain’s Best Restaurants. But What About Their Wine Lists?

There is a rather obvious place to start when you are trying to build a database of genuinely brilliant restaurants.

Look at the restaurants that other people have already decided are brilliant.

It seems almost suspiciously sensible, which is not always how things work in the wine world.

If a restaurant has earned a Michelin Star, appeared in The Good Food Guide, climbed into the National Restaurant Awards, been recognised by Harden’s, made the Top 50 Gastropubs or collected a respectable pile of AA Rosettes, there is a fairly good chance that somebody has already done an awful lot of work establishing that the place is worth visiting.

So that is where SavvySipper starts.

Not because an award automatically makes a wine list brilliant. Quite the opposite.

Our question is rather more awkward:

If a restaurant is good enough to be recognised as one of the best places to eat in Britain, does its wine list deserve the same level of praise?

That is the question we are increasingly interested in answering.

Why Start With Award-Winning and Highly Rated Restaurants?

Building a useful venue database from scratch is a rather enormous undertaking. Britain has an extraordinary number of restaurants, pubs, wine bars, hotels and independent dining rooms, and trying to assess every single one without any form of prioritisation would be a spectacularly inefficient way to spend several years.

Fortunately, the restaurant industry has already created some rather useful signposts.

The MICHELIN Guide has spent more than a century building one of the world's most recognisable restaurant inspection systems. Its inspectors assess restaurants against five core criteria covering ingredient quality, culinary technique, harmony of flavours, the personality of the cuisine and consistency.

That gives us an excellent starting point.

But Michelin is judging the cuisine. It is not awarding a restaurant a Star because somebody has discovered that the £38 bottle of Albariño is actually £11.50 at retail.

And that distinction is precisely where SavvySipper becomes interesting.

Michelin Has Asked: "How Good Is The Food?"

We are asking: "How Good Is The Wine List?"

That does not mean we think the Michelin Guide has somehow forgotten about wine. Far from it. Wine is obviously an important part of the wider restaurant experience.

But its Star criteria are specifically centred on cuisine.

That leaves us with a rather delicious gap.

A restaurant can have exceptional ingredients, extraordinary technique, remarkable dishes and consistency across multiple visits and still have a wine list that leaves the financially conscious diner staring into the middle distance.

Perhaps the wine list is beautifully curated.

Perhaps it is wonderfully priced.

Perhaps the by-the-glass selection is excellent.

Perhaps it contains a fascinating range of regions and grape varieties.

Or perhaps somebody has put a £14 glass price on a bottle that costs £9.99 at retail and hoped nobody would notice.

We rather enjoy noticing.

The Good Food Guide: Does The Experience Match The Reputation?

The Good Food Guide gives us another fascinating source of high-quality venues.

The Guide uses anonymous inspectors who dine like ordinary customers and pay their own bills. Its current scoring system considers uniqueness, deliciousness, warmth and strength of recommendation, producing ratings ranging from Good and Very Good through to Exceptional and, in a very small number of cases, World Class.

That is particularly interesting for SavvySipper because the assessment goes beyond the food itself.

It asks whether the restaurant stands out.

Whether the food is genuinely good.

Whether the hospitality works.

Whether the experience is memorable.

And, crucially, whether the reviewer would actually recommend the place.

We can take that same philosophy and apply a slightly different question.

If you are recommending the restaurant as somewhere worth going out of your way to visit, should the wine list also make the journey worthwhile?

Harden’s: The Diners Have Already Spoken

Then there is Harden’s, which brings an entirely different source of evidence into the equation.

Harden’s restaurant guides are built around large-scale consumer feedback, with tens of thousands of diner reports contributing to the annual guides. Restaurants are compared with others in the same price bracket, which gives the system a particularly useful focus on what diners actually get for their money.

We rather like this approach because it introduces the voice of the person actually sitting at the table.

Not the chef.

Not the PR department.

Not the restaurant owner.

The diner who has just handed over their card and is wondering whether the evening was worth it.

That makes Harden’s particularly useful when building our venue hunting list.

If thousands of diners consistently rate a restaurant highly, we want to know what happens when that same restaurant's wine list gets put under the SavvySipper microscope.

Top 50 Gastropubs: Because Pubs Deserve Proper Wine Analysis Too

We are not going to make the mistake of assuming that serious wine only happens underneath chandeliers.

The Top 50 Gastropubs is an obvious hunting ground for SavvySipper.

The list is created using votes from a UK-wide academy of hospitality professionals and other industry figures, with the process designed to recognise gastropubs delivering outstanding food and overall experiences.

And the underlying philosophy is wonderfully aligned with what we are trying to do.

You have a gastropub that has been recognised as one of Britain's best.

The food is excellent.

The atmosphere is excellent.

The service is excellent.

Now let's have a look at the wine.

Because nobody ever said that being brilliant at Sunday lunch automatically makes you brilliant at pricing Chenin Blanc.

The National Restaurant Awards: A Particularly Interesting Rabbit Hole

The National Restaurant Awards are another obvious source for our venue discovery process.

The awards use an industry judging academy made up of chefs, restaurateurs, food writers and other experts, with judges voting for restaurants they have personally experienced. The resulting rankings provide a useful snapshot of the restaurants the UK's food industry currently considers worthy of attention.

There is also a rather useful detail for us.

The National Restaurant Awards has a dedicated Wine List of the Year award.

In other words, somebody else is already asking the same question we are.

The difference is that SavvySipper is not simply interested in whether a wine list is impressive. We want to understand the relationship between quality, pricing, choice and consumer value.

That makes the National Restaurant Awards an especially interesting hunting ground.

And if a restaurant has been recognised for its wine list, you can be fairly sure we are going to want to have a look.

AA Rosettes: Another Useful Quality Signal

The AA Rosette system gives us another useful layer of information.

AA restaurant assessments focus primarily on food quality, flavour, technical skill and consistency, with higher levels of recognition also taking account of elements such as service and the wider dining experience.

That makes these venues particularly interesting to SavvySipper.

If the kitchen is operating at a level that demands national recognition, the wine list should ideally be able to keep up.

Not necessarily with £500 bottles of Burgundy.

Not necessarily with a 900-bin cellar.

Simply with a wine programme that makes sense for the food, the customer and the price being charged.

And Then There Are The World's 50 Best

At the other end of the scale sits The World's 50 Best Restaurants.

This is a global rather than purely British benchmark, built from an international voting academy of culinary experts. The list is designed to provide a snapshot of leading culinary destinations and emerging trends in the restaurant world.

For SavvySipper, these restaurants represent an intriguing extreme.

If a venue is operating at the absolute pinnacle of global gastronomy, what does its wine list look like?

Does the list reflect the same creativity as the kitchen?

Does it introduce diners to unusual producers?

Does it provide sensible options for people who don't want to spend the GDP of a small island on a bottle?

Does the by-the-glass selection give diners a meaningful way into the wine programme?

And, perhaps most importantly, does the pricing make any sense?

Leading Restaurants: Connecting The Dots

We also keep an eye on Leading Restaurants, which is useful because it brings together restaurants recognised by several major guides and awards.

That makes it particularly useful when we are trying to identify clusters of restaurants that have already demonstrated a high level of quality.

And clusters matter.

Because SavvySipper isn't trying to build a directory of restaurants simply for the sake of having a very large number at the bottom of a spreadsheet.

We want a strong foundation.

We want venues where the wine analysis is genuinely interesting.

We want places where a SavvyScore means something.

And we want enough high-quality venues in the system that consumers can actually use the information to discover somewhere worth visiting.

The Brilliant Bit: None Of These Accolades Guarantees A Great SavvyScore

This is where things get particularly interesting.

We are not building SavvySipper to hand out participation trophies.

A Michelin Star does not automatically equal Savvy Accreditation.

A Top 50 Gastropub does not automatically equal Savvy Accreditation.

A National Restaurant Awards Top 100 position does not automatically equal Savvy Accreditation.

An Exceptional Good Food Guide rating does not automatically equal Savvy Accreditation.

And being beloved by thousands of Harden’s diners certainly does not get you a free pass.

Why?

Because the questions are different.

The major food guides are largely asking whether the restaurant delivers an exceptional dining experience, exceptional food or exceptional hospitality.

SavvySipper is asking whether the wine list itself delivers exceptional quality-to-value.

That Is Where The SavvyScore Comes In

The SavvyScore looks at four distinct areas of a venue's wine list.

Margin Fairness considers how restaurant pricing compares with retail benchmarks.

Glass Tax looks at the economics of buying wine by the glass compared with the equivalent bottle price.

Crowd Score considers the quality signal coming from consumer ratings.

Menu Discovery looks at the breadth and diversity of the wine selection, including bottles, grape varieties and countries represented.

That creates a rather different assessment from simply asking whether the restaurant has a famous chef.

A venue could have a brilliant kitchen and a spectacular dining room while still having a wine list that is poorly priced, repetitive or unnecessarily restrictive.

Equally, a smaller restaurant might have a modest-looking list that is extraordinarily well chosen and fairly priced.

That second restaurant may have considerably more to offer the savvy wine drinker.

We Are Looking For The Outliers

This is perhaps the most exciting part of the process.

We are not only looking for the famous restaurants.

We are looking for the unexpectedly brilliant wine lists.

The restaurant with a Michelin recommendation whose wines are priced remarkably fairly.

The gastropub with a tiny list that somehow manages to cover half of Europe without becoming a 14-page encyclopaedia.

The neighbourhood restaurant with a £30 bottle that absolutely wipes the floor with the £70 bottle next door.

The wine bar where the by-the-glass selection has clearly been designed by somebody who actually cares about getting people to discover new wines.

And yes, occasionally, the restaurant where the numbers make you quietly wonder whether the wine list was priced by throwing darts at a spreadsheet.

Those are all useful discoveries.

Because Accreditation Should Be Earned, Not Bought

That is also why SavvySipper Accreditation matters.

We do not sell higher scores.

We do not take sponsorship money from distributors in exchange for better rankings.

We do not allow a restaurant to buy its way onto the top of the list.

The whole point is that the accreditation should mean something.

A score of 80 or above earns SavvySipper Accreditation because the venue has demonstrated a strong combination of pricing fairness, wine quality signals, glass economics and menu discovery.

It is not an award for being fashionable.

It is not an award for having a famous chef.

It is not an award for having an enormous cellar.

It is a signal that says something considerably simpler:

This restaurant takes its wine seriously and treats its customers fairly.

The Great Restaurant Audit

So our venue-hunting process starts with the places already attracting attention.

We look at Michelin.

We look at The Good Food Guide.

We look at Harden's.

We look at Top 50 Gastropubs.

We look at the National Restaurant Awards.

We look at AA Rosettes.

We look at recognised restaurant rankings and specialist guides.

Then we start digging.

What wines are actually being sold?

What are they charging?

What does the same wine cost elsewhere?

How does the glass price compare with the bottle?

How adventurous is the list?

How highly are the wines rated?

And ultimately:

Does the wine list live up to the reputation of the restaurant?

The Wine List Is Part Of The Experience

It is easy to think of the wine list as an accessory to the meal.

It isn't.

For many restaurants, wine can represent a significant part of the customer's spend. It can shape the meal, influence what diners order, introduce customers to producers and regions they have never encountered before, and materially affect whether somebody leaves feeling that they have had a brilliant evening or have been gently mugged in a room with linen tablecloths.

A great wine list should therefore do more than contain expensive bottles.

It should have personality.

It should make sense.

It should complement the food.

It should offer discovery.

And, ideally, it should give customers enough confidence to spend a little more because they know what they are buying.

That is exactly the behaviour SavvySipper is designed to encourage.

And This Is Only The Beginning

As the SavvySipper venue directory grows, our ambition is to create one of the most useful datasets in the UK for understanding restaurant wine lists.

Not simply which restaurants are famous.

Not simply which restaurants have won awards.

But which restaurants offer genuinely compelling wine experiences.

That means combining the established reputation of the restaurant industry with a completely different layer of analysis.

Food guides can tell you where to eat.

Restaurant awards can tell you who the industry respects.

Diners can tell you where they had a great experience.

SavvySipper can then ask the question nobody else is quite asking in the same way:

What does the wine list actually look like when we take the romance out of it and do the maths?

The Savvy Verdict

We are starting with Britain's most celebrated restaurants because they provide the strongest possible test.

If a restaurant is already recognised for outstanding food, hospitality or overall experience, we want to know whether its wine list is equally deserving of praise.

Sometimes it will be.

Sometimes it won't.

And occasionally we expect to find a wine list so good that the restaurant deserves even more attention for it.

That is the hunt.

And if you are a restaurant owner wondering what happens when your wine list eventually lands on the SavvySipper radar, there is a perfectly civilised solution.

You can find out how SavvySipper works with venues, or, if you would rather get ahead of the inevitable scrutiny, request a SavvySipper wine list audit.

Because there is only one thing better than discovering your restaurant has a brilliant wine list.

Knowing it before we do.