A Michelin star may have come and gone at this discreet Chelsea stalwart, but the food has barely changed in the decade since it opened. For the avoidance of doubt, this not necessarily a bad thing: the duck egg tart to start remains a perfect dish; Belted Galloway rump with triple-cooked chips and béarnise will never not hit a certain kind of diner’s pleasure centre. Where things definitely have evolved is on the wine front: head sommelier Melania Battiston has worked wonders on a list that used to be as awash in claret as some of the more bibulous regulars, and these days, Australia and Northern America are just as prominent as some real heavy hitters from Northern Italy and the Rhone. Sub-£50 bottles see decent representation and there is even more than a passing nod to natural wine hotbeds like Jura and the Loire. Perhaps most importantly, the staggeringly reasonable corkage charge remains in place, ensuring that most of the most impressive bottles drunk at Medlar may not even come from its own cellar.

Mayfair, tasting menu; the crown of perhaps London’s buzziest restaurant: there are plenty of red flags that suggest Kol could be the worst most overpriced kind of trap into which a thirsty wine-lover could fall. And yet the block capitals that greet the reader opening the relatively svelte list are “CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE,” and the ethos articulated is to “champion products that are grown and made respectfully and are of high quality,” regardless of perceived prestige. When the Michelin inspectors inevitably garland Santiago Lastra with their fanciest baubles this will, therefore, be perhaps the only high-end place in London where wines from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Croatia go toe-to-toe with established classics from Germany and Austria; or where the usual Grand Marque champagne houses and baller Barolos are relegated to a “rest of the world” section where they must vie for supremacy with the likes of the UK’s Tillingham and Marcos Markovitis’s Xinomavro. The food subverts expectations just as deftly: Anyone dreading multi-course tweezer fatigue will find the main event carnitas tacos very much to their liking.

With time at departed Mayfair doyenne The Square under her belt, sommelier Katie Exton is no stranger to uncorking bonkers-expensive bottles. But her list at Lorne offers remarkable value for any stripe of customer: the standard selection boasts recherché German labels and cult Aussies (as well as some interesting riffs on more conventional Old World picks), whilst for the real nerds there’s a separate “single bottle” sheet on which Barolos and Burgundies receive only the most cursory of markups. For those looking for something sweeter, there’s also a selection of Rivesaltes and Banyuls with vintages that go back the best part of a century.

Second children, as a rule, tend to “bounce off” their older siblings, developing opposite traits and zigging where they zagged. Not so for Noble Rot 2.0, which instead seems like an intensification of everything that made the Lambs Conduit Street firstborn so special: in the site formerly occupied by The Gay Hussar, lights are dimmer, furnishings more opulent, spaces cosier and even more convivial. Ex-Sardine head chef Alex Jackson has wrought similar magic on the menu, taking the loosely European signifiers of the Holborn original and distilling them through several hundred pages of Richard Olney. The instant-classic but also deeply classical chicken with vin jaune and morels is the perfect expression of everything this very new, very old institution is all about: sumptuous, decadent, as happy paired alongside Andre Perret’s Condrieu, a viognier grown in granite soils, as it is Domaine Bachelet’s heady Burgundy pinoit noir, Gevrey-Chambertin. Make sure to order pudding.

The food and wine available at this Covent Garden half-bar half-restaurant are notable enough in their own right. But the real jewel in the team’s crown is their app, Drop, which revolutionises wine delivery in much the same way that Amazon Prime did consumer retail (this is another way of saying it’s highly addictive, and highly dangerous to the impulsive). A huge range of wines is searchable by price point and style; there is no minimum order and delivery can be arranged within the hour (and can even be on ice). Drinking at home no longer has to feel like the opening credits to the Bridget Jones movie — just another sign of how much the game in London has changed in the past few years.

Historically, “pub wine” was effectively a category in its own right — one step up from discount supermarket stuff, perhaps, but hardly something to push the needle beyond the usual dry / sweet and red / white binaries. London’s best example of the new wave of pub lists can be found at Islington’s Drapers Arms, where pét-nat and skin contact renegades jostle for space with labels from underappreciated regions like the Cotes Catalanes and Georgia. A dedicated reserve list features the sort of prestige cuvées — from Burgundy, Bordeaux and Northern Italy — that might turn an already-heroic Sunday lunch offering into the stuff of legend.

Shitposts, memes, growth-hack marketing campaigns: the benevolent edgelords at Top Cuvée have given them all a crack during the last year of lockdowns and, in doing so, have done more than any other brand to popularise a specific school of easy-to-drink, even-easier-to-reorder-online-when-drunk vin de soif. In Keeling + Andrew’s Chin Chin, this Highbury bar created arguably the UK’s first viral wine; in collaborating with Instagram icon Raven Smith it’s well on its way to creating its second. A new Bethnal Green site is forthcoming; whatever happens, the Instagram account is bound to be essential viewing.

Named after a famous Ancient Greek cynic, Diogenes The Dog aims to make what can at times feel like an elitist and inaccessible space something far more approachable and enjoyable. It takes a genuinely globalist approach to the problem, too, elevating producers from Texas, Bulgaria, The Czech Republic and Brazil in the process. Cheeses, cured meats, and an array of seasonal toasties are at hand for those who want some actual food with their food for thought; a relaxed house style courtesy of owner Sunny Hodge stops things from ever feeling like too much hard work.

Like a number of London’s newest independent wine bars, Newcomer is first and foremost a shop. Unlike almost anywhere else in the city, Newcomer sells and serves varieties almost exclusively from Austria. Founder Peter Honegger opened the shop last year and imports wines served at a number of other places on this list. But to get a full understanding of wines from the region, this is the place to visit — over 250 wines are available to take away or drink in, the majority of which are sourced directly from their network of winemakers in Austria. The by the glass selection changes daily, depending on the owners’ mood; food is usually charcuterie and cheese with bread and pickles, but it’s currently running a summer dinner series with a little more heft, alongside SSAW Collective.

There was something radical about Michael Sager and his then business partner, Charlotte Wilde, opening this bar on Hackney Road in the summer of 2013. For a start, there were (and still are) many more-than-average options by the glass. The menu normally lists around 30, with prices ranging from £4 to £15.50. Also notable about the selection was the availability of old vintage, new world wines, thanks largely to the education Sager had undergone in California. West Coast U.S. wines are still a speciality here. Not that this gets in the way of a fantastic range of French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Italian wines too.

First off, it’s just a perfect name for a restaurant: a statement of intent that positioned Ed Wilson and co’s beautifully rickety dining rooms as an evolution of the blueprint laid out by St John. But it’s also a slightly misleading handle: brawn, after all, proverbially comes at the expense of brains, and in the years since it opened in 2010, this self-professed neighbourhood restaurant has savvily moved in lockstep with the area around it. Immaculate oysters and Cantabrian anchovies are just as likely to kick things off these days as pig’s head terrine; the gentle influence of Campania (the restaurant round the corner, maybe also the Italian region) can be felt on a list of pastas that seems to only improve with age. Factor in a dining room ripped straight from date night fantasy, and perhaps the single best compendium of low-intervention French bottles in town, and there’s plenty to suggest Brawn remains just as essential in its second decade as its first.

Bright opened in 2018. In the last 18 months, it has been so many things — bottle shop, traiteur, al fresco terrazza, hypebeast squid sando maven — that it is easy to forget that for the year and half before that it was quietly ploughing its own furrow as one of London’s most low-key clever and high-key delicious restaurants. Headed up by Will Gleave, the kitchen is not without an eye for the theatrical, especially when it comes to frying things (for that pre-pandemic lasagna fritta, see this summer’s courgette and anchovy number) but below the gorgeous surface has undeniably robust fundamentals. For all the eyecatching Gabrio Binis decorating the shelves, the list is likewise a case study in strength in depth, as well as a rebuke to anyone claiming natural wine is always overpriced.

“Our band could be your life’,” sang The Minutemen on ‘History Lesson Part 2,’ and when P. Franco opened its doors for the first time midway through the last decade, it promised something similar. If great wine captures the essence of a time and a place, great wine bars do, too: for anyone trying to understand natural wine, and East London, and natural wine in East London, this remains the first port of call. Some of the team may have moved on to pastures new; these days it is Chase Lovecky doing extraordinary things with a fridge and an induction hob. P. Franco has changed, just like the world around it. But the lightning remains safely trapped in the bottle.