Wine in Edinburgh

Every menu change at Nectar involves a tasting session that most guests never know about. When we are considering a new wine for the list, our supplier brings samples. Several bottles, sometimes more, representing different options across the category we are trying to fill. We open them, we taste them alongside the food they are intended for, and we make a decision. The process is not complicated, but it is never purely internal. We invite guests who are in the bar at the tim

A guest told me something once that I have not stopped thinking about since. They said that finding a Malbec that is actually French is uncommon, and that if you do find one, it has a story behind it worth asking about. I did not know at the time how right they were. Most people who order a Malbec anywhere in the world are drinking something from Argentina, and most people, understandably, assume that is simply where the grape comes from. It is not. Malbec is French. It was n

We get this question more than almost any other at the bar. Do you have a dry white wine? The honest answer is yes, several, and most of the whites on the Nectar list are technically dry. But over the course of the first year I have understood what this question actually means, and it is not a question about sugar content or winemaking technique. It is a question about feeling. The person asking it wants something light, crisp, clean, and easy to drink. Something that feels l

There is a moment that happens at Nectar fairly regularly, usually toward the end of a meal, when a small cold glass arrives at a table that did not order it. We pour mastiha as a house serve for regulars, for large groups who have eaten well and stayed long, and for guests we want to look after in the particular way that the end of a good meal deserves. It is not on the menu. It just appears. A small glass, served cold, clear as water, with a quality that is immediately dist

My father visits Edinburgh fairly regularly. Every time he does, we end up at Nectar, which is as it should be. He sits at the bar, catches up with the team, and then does the thing that still makes me laugh every single time: he orders a cocktail. This is a man who almost exclusively drinks wine and beer. He is Czech, which means he was raised on some of the finest lager in the world, in a country that takes its brewing with a seriousness that most nations reserve for things

There is a moment that happens at Nectar fairly regularly with this wine. Someone is ordering a bottle, usually because they have asked what goes well with the meat platter and I have pointed them toward the Xinomavro. The bottle arrives at the table. I open it and pour the first glass. They take a sip, pause slightly, and then look at the wine with a different kind of attention. Not confusion exactly. More like recalibration. They were expecting something, and this is someth

If there is one bottle I genuinely love opening at Nectar, it is our Assyrtiko. Not only because of how it tastes, but because every time the cork comes out, it starts a story at the table. On our menu we describe it in three words. Crisp. Citrus. Lively. Those three words capture exactly what happens in the glass. It feels bright and energetic, refreshing without being simple, and perfectly suited to the way we like to eat and drink. The Crystals Everyone Asks About One of m

There is a specific memory that comes back to me every time I look at the Montepulciano Castelvecchio d'Abruzzo on the shelf. I am in the back seat of a car somewhere in central Italy. I am eight, maybe nine. My brother is next to me. Between us is a laptop, and we are watching Gladiator, because that was the film we watched on every long car journey in that period of my childhood and neither of us ever got tired of it. Outside the window, the Italian countryside is doing wha

There is a particular kind of pleasure that comes from a wine that misleads you slightly before it delivers. Not in a dishonest way. In the way that a great film does, where the first scene sets an expectation that the second scene quietly and deliberately overturns. The Wide River Shiraz from Robertson, South Africa does exactly that. It announces itself one way on the nose and then arrives quite differently on the palate. That gap, small but meaningful, is the thing that ma

When a table is filled with shared plates, choosing the right wine can feel more complicated than it needs to be. At Nectar, food is designed to be ordered generously and enjoyed together. That means your table will often feature vegetables, meat, fish and cheese all at once. Rather than trying to find a wine that perfectly matches everything, we recommend a simpler and far more enjoyable approach. Start by deciding which dish you want to be the focus , and let that lead your

At Nectar, the wine list follows the same rule as the food and the cocktails. Nothing gets to exist in isolation. Every bottle has to earn its place, and earning its place means it has to be able to pair with something, tell a story worth telling, and give a guest a reason to choose it over everything else on the page. We have written about that philosophy properly in how pairing actually works at Nectar, and about the Edinburgh wine merchant, the Great Grog, who has helped u