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

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

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 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