Postcard from the boulevards: Moving from London to Paris has shown me which is the real wine capital

‘Move over Paris, London is now the wine capital of world’, declared a headline in The Times earlier this year.

I was struck by the headline. First because of the obvious mistake that the Times’ sub-editors had failed to spot.

Secondly, because I had just boarded the Eurostar to leave London, my home for more than a decade at that point, and move to Paris. Was this a catastrophic mistake?

I needn’t have worried.

To no great surprise, the article’s assertion was pure bunk, built on the flimsiest of criteria pulled from a Wealth Index compiled by real-estate agents Knight Frank and data analytics firm Wine Services.

In summary, London, apparently, ‘once reviled by oenophiles as the cultural desert of the western world’ (umm…) ‘now has the largest number of restaurants serving the finest wines in the world.’

According to the report, London has more restaurants/hotels serving more wines (from a pool of 250 ‘top estates’), with more wines per list and – best of all – for higher prices; £584 per bottle on average versus a rather paltry £177 in Paris.

Put that in your goblets and swill it, you bunch of sans culottes.

Drink the rich

And who do we have to thank for making London’s finest wine lists so blandly formulaic and morbidly expensive?

Why, it’s ‘the global rich’ of course, the report asserts.

That’s right, ‘an influx of American tech tycoons, Middle Eastern royalty and Indian and Chinese business moguls buying up luxury homes in neighbourhoods like Mayfair and Kensington or staying in the finest hotels’, has finally propelled London’s moribund wine scene out of the stew of Piat d’Or and Blue Nun in which it had wallowed for centuries.

Needless to say, such ‘findings’ left me rather cold.

However, the intervening six months have given me enough time to reflect on the wine scene in both cities.

Though not enough time, apparently, for the paper’s editors to correct the mistake in the headline…

Shop window on the world

London has much to recommend it as a wine city. Its international outlook and mercantile heritage means it offers a choice of wine that is nearly unmatched – certainly in Europe – for its variety and distinctiveness.

Away from the luxury resorts of Knightsbridge, that 180° (ish) arc eastwards from Islington to Peckham is teeming with wine shops and bars, offering an array of wines that would make a spice bazaar in a tale from the One Thousand and One Nights blush.

But the wealth report did get one thing right. The problem with drinking wine in London is that it’s expensive.

Let’s be honest, it’s bloody expensive.

Obscenely so at times. Quarterly review The Fence recently ran a poll on the worst places to drink in London in which it revealed wine lists where prices were five times higher than retail.

You may recall there was recently shock and horror that Paris restaurants were ripping off patrons by giving them less expensive wines than what was being ordered.

You wouldn’t get a story like that from London of course – because every glass of wine is a rip-off no matter what you order or where. And yes that very much includes my favourite haunts to buy or drink low-intervention wines in Hackney.

Obscene ground rents, rising handling costs and being scalped by successive duty increases from avaricious and cack-handed governments are among the factors conspiring to price wine lovers out of the game.

And don’t even get me started on the comparative price of croissants.

Where the living is easy

And you can sense it’s just not quite like that in Paris.

Yes, it’s more expensive than the French average. Yes, there’s a lot of plain and mediocre wine served in many bistros.

But if you steer clear of the worst offenders around the big monuments and boulevards, then London doesn’t quite have anything to rival the caves and bars à vin of Paris, where you can while away the hours on a terrace, drinking cheaply and without a care in the world.

Paris is a city where drinking wine just comes naturally. Everyone does it. My quartier hums with the sound of friendly chatter around tables festooned with bottles and glasses every night – well, not now perhaps. It is August after all.

And all the natty and boutique producers the cork-dorks swoon over in London I find everywhere in retail and restaurants for far lower prices.

Sure, the choices here are more singularly gallic. But drinking French is not symptomatic of a lack of choice. Not a bit of it.

France isn’t a wine-producing country, it is a wine-hued universe, a vinous nebula all of its own.

Every visit to the bottle shop is a chance to pick up something new, be it from Beaujolais, the Loire, Jura, Auvergne – ‘wait, where’s that from?’ – Languedoc – ‘ah!’

Since moving to Paris I’ve been buying more wine, dining out more and enjoying a relationship with wine that doesn’t have me cringing at what I can’t afford and wincing at what little I can.

The Times article declared at the start that London was no longer, ‘a no-go area for serious wine people’, the irony being that the more expensive it becomes – and the more five-star lists at ungodly prices are used as a yardstick – the risk is it will become exactly that.

In the meantime, I don’t think Paris has anything to worry about.