BLEND IT LIKE BACCHUS

Douglas Blyde gets a sneak peek at hotly anticipated Mayfair restaurant Bacchanalia’s wine list

‘Wine defines the majority of Western civilisation,’ says the mind behind Bacchanalia’s wine programme, Terry Kandylis, who is himself a winemaker. With invitations to the grand opening posted, Bacchanalia will be serial restaurateur Richard Caring’s boldest project to date. Occupying three floors of the former Porsche showroom at the top of Berkeley Square, which already features Caring’s Sexy Fish and Annabel’s club, the concept, including its ‘Apollo’s Muse’ members’ club, celebrates covetable wines amid a collage of giant, winged sculptures by Damien Hirst straight out of mythology. Previously awarded best sommelier in his native Greece and in the UK, Kandylis’s selections include the Argyros pre-phylloxera, a yellow stone fruit-scented Assyrtiko — ‘Greece’s leading grape’, reaped from the otherwise inhospitable black igneous rock of Santorini — and the Barolo-like Xinomavro from young-gun producer Apostolos Thymiopoulos in Naoussa. The latter has a juicy strawberry and intriguing stewed tomato note followed by a bitter finish — it demands a slow cooked rack of lamb, ‘Greece’s favourite meat’, says Kandylis. And from Italy, Kandylis has amassed all of the wines awarded a full 100 points by Wine Advocate under Bacchanalia’s dramatically frescoed roof.

‘The world of wine teaches me to stay humble and listen to guests rather than think, “What do I want to sell?”’ says Kandylis. By contrast, Bacchanalia, with its massive ambitions, will feel anything but meek…

Opens mid November (bacchanalia.co.uk)