Wine list at Wapping Food

This review was first published in January 2001

The Australians are coming. No; scrub that. The Australians have arrived.

In a couple of decades, they've gone from joke status (Kanga Rouge and invalid port) to being Britain's number two wine supplier. They now have France in their sights, and are preparing to slingshot themselves past the vine's mother country by 2005, consumers willing. (They seem to be.)

Under such circumstances, an all-Australian wine list in a serious London restaurant is long overdue. Wapping Food provided just that when it opened last November.

Manager Ben van Stellingwerff, who may have been born in Wanstead but grew up surrounded by Australian vines in Mudgee and Orange, was keen not only to stress Australia's coming of age but also its variety. "People say they don't like Australian chardonnay but what do they mean? Western Australia is as far from the Hunter Valley as Istanbul is from Madrid." He stresses that Wapping Food isn't an Australian restaurant, just one which happens to have an Australian wine list. "Hey, I like French wine. It's very good. We cook with it."

In many ways, this is the perfect venue to uncork Australia. The smell of ghostly machine oil which greets you as you walk into the barely converted Wap-ping Hydraulic Power Station is, sure enough, a distant cousin of that whiff of salty treacle which you find in a great Barossa Shiraz. Australia prides itself on its open-collar informality compared to the haughty elegance of the European wine elite; this is the ideal place to turn up for dinner in a boiler suit. Chairs dangling off the ceiling are vaguely redolent (by a sort of anti-gravitational logic) of a country on the other side of the world; while the spotlight trained on little mounds of oranges, lemons and limes at the bar seems to hint at sunshine whose clarity and power has no equivalent in the northern hemisphere.

Restaurants are theatre, and none more so than this prop-filled tribute to throbbing power. Where do you find throbbing power and theatricality in the wine world if not in Australia? Australians, oddly and finally, like to drink beer after lots of wine, and you can stagger straight out of Wapping Food and across into the Prospect of Whitby. This is a great London riverside pub, albeit one run with disheartening sloppiness by its present owners.

So far, thus, so good. Now we get down to business: what do you put in your mouth? How art-fully contrived are the aromas and flavours? How soothing and coaxing is the combination between food and wine? Are you stimulated and seduced in equal measure? Does your digestive system purr afterwards? Is your breath sweet the following morning? These are the signifiers of a great meal. If Wapping Food and its all-Australian wine list can furnish them, then Australia really has arrived.

We began with a pre-dinner glass of white (2000 Mount Langi Ghiran Pinot Gris, £5.50 including 10 per cent service) and one of rosé, Charlie Melton's 2000 Rose of Virginia (£5.50). The Pinot Gris was excellent: dryish, unoaked, sappy, charged with soft and pleasing pear fruit. The Rose of Virginia, by contrast, was dark, soupy, overweight, muddled and Ribena-esque, and its musky enchantment quickly palled.

Onion bread and lemon-charged olives proved perfect appetite-stokers.

To accompany pea-and-ham soup and deep-fried crab cakes, followed by dukkah-crusted monkfish, couscous and baked aubergine, and a cipollini risotto, we decided to ask our waiter, Ashley Mead, for some advice. A lightish red, we thought; something supple, refreshing and digestible. Ashley, it turned out, didn't like reds much because the tannin stuck to his teeth, but he said that the Peter Lehmann Grenache (£13.75) and the Rye-croft Flametree Red (a Grenache-Syrah-Mourvèdre, we were told: £16.50) were both good and might suit.

IWAS concerned that Grenache be too sweetly fruited for fish, so we decided to take a punt on the only Pinot Noir on the list. This was typed as 1999 "Mount Barker/Pemberton", but was in fact made by Plantagenet (£31.90 including service). Ashley - who, by the way, is a real sweetie and a star waiter in most respects - hadn't tried it, but he did his best to chill it down a little from the warm room temperature. It was fair, but no more, characterised by tenuous, dry, hot fruit and lots of oak, thus resembling not so much red burgundy as a second-division Rioja.

It probably went best with the satisfyingly oniony cippolini risotto (£12.65), strewn with baby beetroot leaves to cheer up its appearance. The pea-andham soup (£4.95) was a disappointment, since the natural sweetness of the peas was eclipsed by mad salt levels; there was no trace, either, of the compensatory smoky richness of a good ham bone. The crab cakes (£7.15) should really have been renamed egg cakes, so bouncy were they. The dukkah-crust on the monkfish (£14.85) was a true symphony of seeds and quite delicious, though the dish was spoiled by the fact that the accompanying aubergine had not been cooked but incinerated. It was replaced by more sensitively seared courgettes.