The wine list at Lindsay House

This review was first published in April 2002

The appeal of Lindsay House, evident to you as you push the frontdoor bell to gain admission, is that this is an insider's, comeback-to-my-place restaurant where friendship smiles on custom. Small rooms, narrow stairs and rickety sanitary fittings add to the sense of old-Soho domesticity.

Richard Corrigan's food could plausibly have been based on a thorough trawl through Berwick Street market and around the local shops. The wine list, to continue the script, should be an enthusiast's cellarful, the sort of list on which no bottle has much of a reputation but every bottle has a story to tell.

And that, more or less, is exactly what it is. Our glass of apèritif wine, for example, was a JuranÁon Sec from Charles Hours - in other words, an intense, mountain-fresh white from the Pyrenees made by a beaming, jolly man who not only looks like a bear but whose name is homonymous with the French word for "bear", which is ours.

With its piercing acidity and subtle, faintly exotic fruits, it made a refreshing taste of elsewhere, far elsewhere. We could also have drunk a Chardonnay whose sale helps restore church towers (the Toques et Clochers example from Limoux) or a Gew¸rztraminer produced according to the movement of the planets and with due respect to astral and etheric forces (Zind-Humbrecht's superb Wintzenheim version).

Fay Maschler and I asked for help (and more stories) to choose our lunch bottle, but the Dutch sommelier and list-compiler Pieter van Kleef was off that day. ("He's not a qualified sommelier," Richard Corrigan proudly told us later, "but someone who serves the customers with their wine without goddamn attitude.") Manager Walter Lecocq murmuringly stood in.

The problem - or the pleasure - was that we were going to eat fish and shellfish but preferred a bottle of red. This is a frequent occurrence, of course, and is one reason why restaurants tend to stock far more light-bodied reds than you will normally find on a supermarket shelf, where heavy is king.

Lecocq led us on an attitudefree ramble towards the 1997 red from Dominique Hauvette in Les Baux de Provence. I was glad he had. When I met Madame Hauvette last August, she proved perhaps the grumpiest wine grower I had ever encountered (the norm tends to be jolly and bear-like), and that memory had made me forget what good wine it was she made.

This five-year-old bottle smelled like something relaxed and enticing from Bordeaux (it contains 25 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon), but tasted altogether more southern: warm and rounded, yet precise, too, oozing curranty refinement. We loved it.

There were lots of other things on the list I wanted to try, including the Suffrëne from Bandol, the Riesling Brand from Zind-Humbrecht, the Cahors from Le Cëdre, the Dao from Roques and the Mourvëdre Ancient Vines from Cline Cellars. Prices are, alas, the least friendly aspect of this well-compiled list: our glasses of Jurancon were £7 each plus 88p for the service; the non-grumpy Provence red was £48, plus another £6 to get the cork out.

A bottle of Veuve Clicquot costs £72 here (or £81 including service); you can buy it in Sainsbury or Waitrose for £25.49. But an evening here would be more fun.

Wine list scores four out of five.