Wine lists at designer prices

A triangular comparison between the wine lists of The Dorchester, The Oak Room and Brown's 1837 restaurant is educative and frightening. Educative because The Oak Room and 1837 show how soporific hotel dining rooms can rise from their slumbers (in which, wine-wise, The Dorchester still dozes) and roar at each other up and down Piccadilly. Frightening because all three will take huge, brontosaurus-sized bites out of your back pocket.

Indeed, to do justice to The Oak Room list, you will need to arrive in a Securicor van. Twenty-two vintages of P?trus (15 of them costing more than £1,000 per bottle) and 23 of Grange; 30 vintages of Mouton-Rothschild back to 1918; 48 vintages of Yquem back to 1888; 33 vintages of Latour back to 1861 (making the most of this archeological approach to the world's most fancied wines demands spending of extreme recklessness.

It is, unquestionably, a great list (perhaps London's greatest) in terms of classical depth, though grandeur of this sort exists on paper only for most of us. At a more realistic level, a bottle of Bolly is £80 (£27.90 at Sainsbury's); Cloudy Bay Sauvignon '99 is £50, (it was £21 at Ransome's Dock while stocks lasted this summer) and a bottle of Chablis from Picq is £30. (There is not a huge range of modest wines of this sort, but what there are are well-chosen. The Dorchester's list is short, straightforward and unimaginative by comparison, though Bollinger at £68, Cloudy Bay Sauvignon '99 at £38 and three sound basic Chablis (from Defaix, Billaud-Simon and Laroche) at £30-£34.50 make it a mite less painful financially. Latour and Yquem are present in one vintage only; Mouton-Rothschild in two. The "Cellar Master's Choice", with its Louis Latour Meursault, its Baron Philippe Graves and its Geoff Merrill Sauvignon Blanc/Semillon, suggests a timid spirit down in the vaults.

For the wine-curious, Brown's 1837 restaurant is certainly the most rewarding of the three. There is not the blue-blooded authority of The Oak Room list here, though if you must have Mouton or Latour there are still five or six to chose from. Far more interesting in some ways, though, are the eight vintages (back to 1967) of Cahors' Triguedina; the brilliant range of 28 fine German Rieslings (The Dorchester has one pathetic specimen only); luscious white burgundies; and an extensive selection (11 bottles) of C^TMtes du Rh^TMne wines from the outstanding Domaine Gramenon.

Eclectic drinking is made easier still by 62 half-bottles and more than 150 wines by the glass. You really can have a little of what you fancy. This list is the legacy of former sommelier John Gilchrist, whose current wine fanaticisms I hope to reveal in a week or two. His baton has been gripped by Richard Weiss, and now Emmanuel Defever. Moreover, the spirit of wandering curiosity suffuses Andrew Turner's menu, too, in that five "grazing menus" (of between seven and nine courses each) are offered as an alternative to the usual tripartite meal. Graze we did, allowing (as the menu suggests) Defever to pick wines to accompany each.

The result was a meal of constant stimulation and diversion, requiring frenzied activity on the part of Defever (since others were up for the same game) and, somewhere or other, a glass-washing machine in overdrive. This was lunchtime, and it's hard to get through seven courses and as many wines in much under three hours; the intention, thus, is to serve a five-course "blazing" menu alternative in the middle of the day. There was only one dull wine (a 1998 Franciscan Oakville Estate Chardonnay), and only one ghastly combination (Beaufort and St Marcellin cheeses did a hatchet job on the blossomy, nutty 1991 Coul?e de Ser-rant). For the latter, Defever also offered us a raisiny old 1981 Banyuls from Mas Blanc, which stood its ground well.

Four of the combinations were outstanding. Ostertag's 1999 Vieilles Vignes Sylvaner, with its taste of apples and ground pumice-stones, made an agreeably mineral foil to an open Cornish crab and tomato raviolo; Bonny Doon's eerily musky 1998 Ca' del Solo Malvasia was weirdly compelling with creamy lobster Bordelaise; and the 1997 Volnay Clos de la Cave from Fran?ois Charles, a frank and exuberant red burgundy, brought fruity vividness to succulent rolled morsels of rabbit fillet with an intense (though salty) reduction.

Best of all, both as a dish and as a combination, was seared foie gras and a monstrous scallop bathed in black olive consomm? matched with the 1997 Brauneberger Juffer Sonnenuhr Sp?tlese of M-F Richter. The fresh sweetness of the Mosel wine, much to my surprise, buried itself in the creamy, quivering morsels like a long-lost lover. Unforgettable.

As was the bill: £159 for a lunch for two (without service, which is genuinely at your discretion). This was a luxurious and highly entertaining few hours, and it could have been made cheaper by picking just a couple of glasses of wine (though the 125-ml measures disappear with swift ease); the grazing menu was £36 each. A £159 bill, if you are being paid the minimum wage, will take a week to earn. It's a lot for a lunch.