Wine Library

Great place for any wine lover. Whenever there’s an occasion or I just want to enjoy a fine bottle of classy wine, this is the place. The last bottle I bought was a Rose from 2009 for just £17. It was good, sparkling and with excellent flavor.
I recommend the place!

Last weekend I got a bottle of Ormes de Pez from here. It was from 2006 and I paid 33 pounds for it which was OK considering it was a gift for my sister. We opened it and it really was top-​quality the flavor, the scent, the color all perfect!

I’ve only used their online ordering service so far but it made me want to check the place.
Delivery was handled very humanly: got a call from the shop as one of the bottle I wanted wasn’t available and they proposed me a very sensible choice for replacement.
Prices of bottles were very competitive compare to other websites and they offer next day delivery for order over £200.
One thing I really liked is the fact that you don’t have to order wines per cases of 6 or 12 bottles as it is usually the case online. Here you can actually order bottle one by one and hence have a try at few different wines.
I had a lot of misfortune in the past ordering wine online, as it usually was very badly perserved-​probably becasue of poor condition of stocking. So far all bottles ordered at that shop were very good!

I suppose it depends what you are looking for as to whether you will like this place or not. It’s in the vaulted basement of a very old townhouse and accessed via a twisty staircase from the street.
The Wine Library is divided into a vaulted area with some seats and stools by underlit shelves mounted on all the walls and a wine shop which is a large room filled with wine with a bookshelf at one end.
The wines are all a little nicer and pricier than you’ll find in most places and the bottles on display range from around £14 to around £400, with the expensive ones being a little dustier. You pick a wine from the shelf yourself and either take it away as you would in any normal shop or hand it to the person working there and it is opened and brought to where you are sitting with some glasses. If you drink your wine there, you are charged the same price as if you take it away but with a corkcage charge of £6 for full bottles and a £3 for half bottles, which is curious as the corks are the same size and so is the work involved in pulling them.
They don’t sell wine by glass although they have brandies and ports this way. You can also order a plate of around 7 cheeses which arrive with a basket of crackers and biscuits. The cheeses are to be honest very expensive and less than stellar.
This is really an after work place, but not for long after work as they close at 8pm. The lighting is far too bright and more suited to reading, a conversation about business or a take it seriously wine tasting event than something more intimate. Think Alexanders, now imagine it with cream painted brickwork and bulkhead lights.
The wines are good, what ambience there would have been was painted out. It may be what the owner intended, a place to try fine wines with little thought given to anything else, which is a shame really, because it could be so good.