The Restaurant Guide for Wine Lovers
Paisa
Paisa is an all-Italian wine bar in Bishop's Stortford, pairing charcuterie, cheese and focaccia with a list that travels the length of the country. Its wine programme is coherent, generous by the glass and genuinely educational, with region notes and exploratory flights that make Italy easy to navigate. It will suit anyone who wants to eat Italian and drink their way around it, from a casual glass to a serious island sweet wine.
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The Bishop's Cave
St Albans, Hertfordshire
Wine, cheese and charcuterie bar
The Bishop's Cave is a cheese and charcuterie bar with no hot kitchen but a genuinely serious cellar, one of two sister bars keeping its own hand-built list. The wine programme is the draw — a characterful, largely direct-imported collection deep in Italy, France and the New World, with a complete by-the-glass range of Port, Sherry and dessert wines that answers the cheeses better than almost any bar of its size. It will suit the drinker who treats a cheese board as a reason to explore a list, glass by glass, with knowledgeable help at the counter.
Read the assessmentMUST Wine Bar
St Albans, Hertfordshire
Wine bar, European small plates and boards
MUST is a wine bar with a kitchen in support — a room built around exploring wine by the glass, with simple European small plates and boards to keep the drinking company. The programme's achievement is breadth made approachable: over seventy wines by the glass from more than twenty countries, clearly described and fairly poured, with fine-wine flights that let a curious drinker taste well above their usual level. It will suit the wine-curious most of all, anyone who would rather travel a list a glass at a time than commit to a single bottle.
Read the assessmentHazels
St Albans, Hertfordshire
Modern French sharing plates, music-led wine bar
Hazels is a music-led wine bar with a serious little French kitchen, pouring a short, hand-picked list of natural and low-intervention wines mostly by the glass. The programme's achievement is character over scale — a genuinely personal selection that sits well with the food, let down only by a published range too short to answer the desserts and the blue cheese. It will suit the drinker who enjoys a curated, low-intervention list and is happy to ask for the finer bottles kept behind the counter.
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