How to choose a wine you have never heard of

Most wine lists in London are built to be recognised. Ours is not. Open it and you will find Rkatsiteli, Kisi, Voskehat, Prokupac, Žilavka - grapes that have been grown for centuries and that almost nobody outside their home valley can pronounce. That is the point, and it is also, we know, slightly terrifying at the moment you have to say one out loud.

So here is the short version: you do not need to know the grape. You need to know two or three things about what you like, and we will do the rest. But if you would rather arrive with a map, this is the one we use.

Start with the vessel, not the grape

In Georgia, wine has been made in qvevri - enormous clay vessels buried up to the neck in the ground - for around eight thousand years. Grapes go in whole, skins and often stems included, and the wine ferments underground at the temperature of the earth. What comes out is not white wine as most people understand it. It is amber, faintly tannic, and it tastes of dried apricot, walnut skin and black tea.

That texture is the thing worth chasing. A qvevri Rkatsiteli has grip, the way a light red does, which is exactly why it works with the food we cook. Roasted peppers with anchovies would flatten a delicate Sancerre. An amber wine meets it head on.

Orange wine is just white wine with skins on

The name causes more confusion than any other word on the list. Orange wine is not made from oranges, is not sweet, and is not a modern invention. It is white grapes fermented on their skins, which is how nearly all wine was made before temperature-controlled steel. Four days on skins gives you something gently textured - a Ribolla Gialla from Slovenia, say, that still drinks like a white. Six months gives you the full amber experience.

If you have never had one, ask for a short-maceration bottle first. It is the same idea at a lower volume.

Low intervention means fewer decisions, not fewer standards

Almost everything we pour is farmed organically and made with minimal additions: wild yeasts, little or no filtration, a small amount of sulphur at bottling or none at all. Done badly this produces cloudy, volatile wine that tastes of cider. Done well - and we only buy the well - it produces wines with unusual clarity of place. Cristian, who runs the list, tastes far more than makes it onto the shelf.

What to actually say to us

Skip the grape names entirely. The three most useful sentences at our counter are: something light and chilled, something with texture, or something that tastes like the last one but different. Tell us what you are eating and roughly what you want to spend, and you will get a glass poured to taste before you commit to it.

Nobody has ever regretted saying: surprise me, but keep it under fifteen.

The list changes weekly because these are small producers in Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Serbia, Slovenia, Hungary, Bosnia and Bulgaria, and quantities are what they are. If you fall for a bottle, tell us - we can usually find you the last one before it goes.