London drinks wine underground more than almost any other European capital, and it is not because anyone thought it was atmospheric. It is a leftover of the wine trade.

Why there are so many cellars under the City

London spent centuries as one of Europe’s great wine ports. The Vintners’ Company got its first royal charter in 1363, which effectively handed it control of wine imports from Gascony — the region around Bordeaux, then ruled by the English crown. Wine arrived by the barrel at the Thames wharves and had to be stored somewhere cool and dark, so the merchants’ buildings went down as well as up.

The ward just north of the river is still called Vintry. The Vintners’ Hall is still on Upper Thames Street. And the vaults that held the barrels are still there, because brick-lined cellars are the last thing to go when a building above them is bombed, demolished or rebuilt. A good number of them now sell wine again, which is a tidy piece of circularity. There is more on all of this in our short history of wine in London.

What makes a cellar bar good

Not all underground bars are worth the stairs. The ones that work have three things:

  • Real structure. A barrel-vaulted brick ceiling, flagstones, or an arch you have to duck under. A basement with a low ceiling is just a basement.
  • Low light that is not a gimmick. Candles because the vaults were never wired properly, rather than candles because someone read about candles.
  • A by-the-glass list worth reading. Atmosphere gets you through the door once. The wine list is why you go back.

Gordon’s on Villiers Street is the one everybody knows: open since the 1890s, usually called London’s oldest wine bar, and genuinely candlelit in genuinely old vaults. Kipling lived in the building upstairs while writing The Light That Failed. It is also permanently full, so go early or go midweek. We list several more in London’s oldest wine bars.

Beyond cellars: crypts and tunnels

The City goes further than cellars. There are cafes and bars inside church crypts, a leftover of a dense medieval parish system and a lot of Victorian and post-war rebuilding. And there are Victorian infrastructure spaces — water tunnels and service vaults — that have been converted into tasting rooms, which is about as London as a wine bar gets: a piece of the water system, turned into somewhere to drink.

Drinking in one of those is the strangest and best part of our Secret Wine Bars of London tour, which runs from a rooftop down to a cellar over three hours.

How to drink down there

Order a flight. Underground bars are usually small, and small bars tend to have interesting by-the-glass lists rather than long bottle lists, so three small pours will show you more than one safe glass. Ask what was opened that day. Get a cheese board. And go on a weekday, because the City of London empties at the weekend and half of these places close with it.

If you want the full version of this, our guide to wine tasting in London covers flights, preservation systems and how to read a list without guessing.