Jason E.
Yelp
I suppose it depends what you are looking for as to whether you will like this place or not. It's in the vaulted basement of a very old townhouse and accessed via a twisty staircase from the street.
The Wine Library is divided into a vaulted area with some seats and stools by underlit shelves mounted on all the walls and a wine shop which is a large room filled with wine with a bookshelf at one end.
The wines are all a little nicer and pricier than you'll find in most places and the bottles on display range from around £14 to around £400, with the expensive ones being a little dustier. You pick a wine from the shelf yourself and either take it away as you would in any normal shop or hand it to the person working there and it is opened and brought to where you are sitting with some glasses. If you drink your wine there, you are charged the same price as if you take it away but with a corkcage charge of £6 for full bottles and a £3 for half bottles, which is curious as the corks are the same size and so is the work involved in pulling them.
They don't sell wine by glass although they have brandies and ports this way. You can also order a plate of around 7 cheeses which arrive with a basket of crackers and biscuits. The cheeses are to be honest very expensive and less than stellar.
This is really an after work place, but not for long after work as they close at 8pm. The lighting is far too bright and more suited to reading, a conversation about business or a take it seriously wine tasting event than something more intimate. Think Alexanders, now imagine it with cream painted brickwork and bulkhead lights.
The wines are good, what ambience there would have been was painted out. It may be what the owner intended, a place to try fine wines with little thought given to anything else, which is a shame really, because it could be so good.
