The wine list at Foliage

This review was first published in July 2000

The stroll to your table at Foliage is not through the fronds of an atrium rainforest, nor is your face caressed by palm leaves as you lower your cherished bottom on to the proffered chair. There was a beautiful orchid on the table, but close inspection revealed its stem to be wholly leafless. The short walk from the lobby does, though, take you through a transparent wine cellar, where mounds of somnolent bottles recline alluringly in Perspex bins. The only leaves I could spot in Foliage were those of the wine list.

Plenty of them, too, and they're handsome enough. When the list has doubled in size, as sommelier and assistant manager Philippe Marques intends, it will be a lure in its own right, provided its existing architectural principles are respected. It's been built with the help of Patrick Sandeman of Lea and Sandeman - in other words, with the motorcycling half of one of London's best and brightest independent young wine merchants. He hasn't, though, stacked it up with his own selections alone; there's plenty here, too, from other keen independents, such as Adam Bancroft and Morris and Verdin. It bristles with talent.

As Fay Maschler's review makes clear, this is a restaurant serving superb food (my raviolo of oxtail was as seductively nourishing a first course as I can ever remember eating, while second-course pork melted remarkably about the probing fork). To discover that a restaurant of this gastronomic authority has a wine list with 40 choices costing £25 or less is encouraging. In general, the pricing policy here means that inexpensive wines cost no more than the standard three times retail (the subtle Cuvée des Conti from Tour des Gendres is £18 here, or £20.25 including service, compared with £6 from Lea and Sandeman; Laurent-Perrier non-vintage champagne is £42.75 including service, which is only £20.75 more than at a Tesco checkout).

More expensive wines swing to and fro on the price front a little, but some are very attractively priced. You might not believe it, but £1,500 (plus £187.50 service) is actually quite a snip for what many consider to be one of the greatest wines of the century - Cheval Blanc 1947. A little espionage has revealed to me that this is a Belgian bottling, something which should be stated on the list, and which accounts for the fact that it doesn't cost a grand more. No doubt the matter would be discussed before the cork was pulled.

In any case, you wouldn't come here to drink labels of that sort; the list's real lure is its first-rate and unusual selections. Nothing is duller than a recitative of names, so I'll spare you that. Let me just say that my knowledgeable guest and I spent the best part of half-an-hour delving about in the list over aperitif glasses of a paradigmatically leafy Sauvignon de Touraine from Jacky Marteau (more foliage!) and Adhémar Boudin's plump and comely little '98 Chablis, and we found bottle after bottle which we'd like to have tried. New World choices are as savvy as the European bottles, and only post-1990 Bordeaux and red Rhones are calling out for reupholstery. (There are no listed wines by the glass, by the way, but Philippe Marques is happy to serve glasses from a small selection he always has open.) Of course, we asked for advice, which proved sound, though coloured (as Marques himself admitted) by French patriotism, which may not always do justice to the remoter quarters of the list.

In the end, we settled for a half-bottle of Cuilleron's 1998 Condrieu (£35 plus £4.38 service) - which Marques actually warned us against, since he said it wouldn't go well with either oxtail raviolo or seared tuna. He was right; but we were happy to have chosen it anyway, since it's such a superb wine and there is nothing else on earth like Condrieu for aromatic power, exoticism and sheer decadent sexiness of flavour.

With pork and chicken, we took his advice and went for a 12-year-old Bourgueil, the 1988 Vaumoreau from Druet (£58 plus £7.25 service), obviously sourced directly and recently from Druet's own cellar, since the label and capsule were both new. It had lost all the foliage allusions which young red Loire can have, and was settling down to be that most French of red wines, one of quiet liveliness, restrained fruit, unobtrusive depth, and superb food aptitude, especially when served lightly chilled, which Marques obligingly did. Skipping desert, we finished the Condrieu. It was a great lunch.