About us
The wine industry is full of passionate people, often working in beautiful landscapes. Sadly it can seem like a subject built to keep people out: lots of foreign names, fussy ritual and confident opinion that can leave an ordinary drinker unsure whether the bottle in their hand is good or merely expensive.
Vinealto exists to clear that fog. Too many people sit down to eat and either order wine without confidence or pay for something that does not make their food taste any better. Closing that gap is the whole of the work.
Wine is not complicated, and it does not need to be. The right wine alongside the right food is one of the real pleasures of eating, and it is available at every price point to anyone who knows what to look for. Our job is to put that knowledge within reach.
The most wine-friendly restaurants in the UK, and increasingly the wider world, and what to order when you get there. From tasting menus to neighbourhood pizza and national chains, every entry is scored against the same published framework and answers the one question most guides never address directly: if you are buying one bottle for this table tonight, which one should it be?
A wine for any dish, with the reasoning that explains it. Enter what you are eating and the Library gives you a considered recommendation (and, alongside the aspirational choice, an accessible everyday one) drawn from the same evidence-led engine that runs the rest of our work. Or work the other way, and find the dishes that suit a wine you already have.
In the Dining app. Photograph a restaurant's wine list, tell it your dishes, and it picks the wines on that list that suit them, in your price range.
Your own blind tasting companion. Read what is in the glass, step by step, and see how close you came.
A phased learning system that turns knowledge into lasting skill. It runs from the free Foundation, through the Certificate in two parts, each awarded on its own, to the Fellowship. Each question comes back when you need it, so what you learn stays learned rather than fading after a cramming session. It is free to begin and properly educational at every level.
The Foundations of Wine Knowledge is our book, and the source of everything the Coach teaches. The printed edition follows soon, from Amazon.
For restaurants: training for the team, and wine lists and menus that sell wine with the food. It opens by registration.
All three products rest on a single principle we call mutual elevation. Wine should make food taste better. Food should make wine taste better. When both sides of that equation are working, the experience at the table is something quite special. When one side is ignored, the meal is less than it should be. Everything we do is in service of that principle.
Wine should make the food taste better, and food should make the wine taste better.
Behind every good bottle is someone who cares: a grower who reads the weather and the soil, a winemaker who has given a vintage their full attention, a sommelier who lives to find the right glass for your table. The wine world runs on that quiet passion, and it is one of the most generous, welcoming worlds there is, once you find the way in.
Vinealto is that way in. We turn the knowledge and the care into something you can use at your own table, so the door to that world is open to you, whatever you know today, and whatever you spend.
Every assessment rests on research into the restaurant's own menu and wine list, measured against the framework we publish in How we assess. Each entry is evaluated with our own assessment software, then read, corrected where needed and approved by a named member of our team before it is published.
Every Guide entry is published in Beta until the restaurant has had the chance to update us on changes to its menu and wine list and to correct factual inaccuracies. We welcome that: menus change, lists evolve, and our entries are more useful when the practical details are current. What restaurants cannot change are our scores or our opinions. Those are ours, based on our assessment of the wine programme at the time of writing.
We defend our independence by never letting money touch an assessment: no restaurant pays for its score or its place in the Guide. Our scores are applied consistently across independent restaurants and national chains using the same published framework, and we publish the reasoning so you can judge for yourself. We are not a food guide; our specific contribution is the wine dimension, which we believe deserves serious independent treatment. And we apply a quality floor: restaurants that do not meet our minimum standard are not published, because a recommendation should represent a real step up from what you would find without it.
The same holds for Vinealto for Business. A restaurant that uses our business services gets no better score and no place in the Guide it has not earned. When we name a wine you can buy, we name it on what is in the glass alone: we take no payment, entry fee, commission or affiliate money from any producer, importer or retailer whose wines we recommend. We may taste wines sent to us free of charge, but a sample never buys a recommendation.
Michael Cross developed a deep interest in wine more than forty years ago, working his way through Masterglass: A Practical Course in Tasting Wine by Jancis Robinson. He has been travelling to wine regions ever since, visiting vineyards, tasting widely and building a cellar. He tastes around 1,500 wines a year.
He is the founder and editor in chief of Vinealto, and lives among the vineyards of Sussex. He set Vinealto up to help others reach the pleasures of a wine world that can seem daunting from the outside.
We would love to hear from you, whether you are a wine lover with a question about a restaurant, a sommelier who thinks a wine programme deserves assessment, a restaurant interested in Vinealto for Business, a regional wine body interested in what we are building, or a food writer who wants to add a wine dimension. Everything starts with a conversation. Write to Elise at elise@vinealto.com.
Our policies, including how to complain and how to appeal an exam result, are on our policies page.
Please help us to improve the function and experience for you. We read every note.