Wine by one

This is the posher end of the Paris wine bar scene, all shiny black tables and polished steel, there is none of the natural avant garde's rusticity here.

The idea (indeed it’s unique concept) will be familiar to anyone who’s visited the Sampler or Selfridges in London. Enomatic machines line the walls upon receipt of your euros, deposited via card, you can taste differing size measures of a selection of wines.

Oddly, the selection of wines on offer when I went seemed strangely outdated. Rather as if I was looking at a top restaurant list from four or five years ago. There were a couple of Mouton Rothschilds, Opus One, Ridge Montebello, a couple of top end (big and oaky) Chilean Carmeneres, Cloudy Bay Sauvignon (mind they had Clos Henri Sauvignon as well).

All very excellent wines, and particularly if you’re French and looking to taste some highly regarded new world wines then it’s not a bad place to stop by. However I couldn’t help but feel that the selection rather missed the changes that have taken place globally in the last five to ten years. There was no evidence of the trend towards lighter less oak influence new world styles. There was a token acknowledgement of the impact that natural wines have had on France, but it didn’t feel like anyone had their heart in that part of the selection.

Finally, we were there on a middling busy Sunday afternoon, and there were simply too many bottles that were empty (I counted 5) or on their last drops. Which for me isn’t good enough to be taken seriously as a wine bar.

Wine by one, 9 rue des capucines 1eme, Paris 

+33 1 42 60 85 76