Nick interviews the man who buys wine for the 5,000 to 6,000 customers fed by Caprice Holdings every night. Above, the interior of Bacchanalia.
Restaurant reviews rarely mention the drinks on offer. And yet they often make a more significant contribution than food to a restaurant’s bottom line. Restaurateurs who overlook the importance of their wine list, do so at their own peril.
The person to whom I turned for counsel on the current state of sommeliers in central London is a 40-year-old Brummie (a person from Birmingham, England – ‘beer country’, he admitted). Darren Ball is extremely well dressed (gleaming cufflinks and silk handkerchief in his brefast pocket) and has an engaging smile. For the past three years he has been head of wine for Richard Caring’s Caprice Holdings restaurants, which means overall responsibility for the wine lists, the sommeliers and everything vinous at Balthazar; J Sheekey; 34 Mayfair; Daphne’s; Sexy Fish in London, Manchester, Dubai and Miami; Scott’s in Mayfair and Richmond; and Bacchanalia, the over-the-top Greek restaurant with Italian overtones on the corner of Berkeley Square, where I met Ball sitting at the bar one lunchtime recently. He was drinking mineral water. Those restaurants will serve between five and six thousand customers a night between them.
I had arrived with a list of questions but these proved unnecessary. Ball is expansively eloquent and hugely enthusiastic about his profession. ‘One of my preoccupations is where our sommeliers of the future will come from’, he began. ‘Brexit obviously closed off what had been for many years the biggest source. So we have to encourage people into the profession. And that’s why this restaurant is so useful. Upstairs there is a large staff canteen where we can hold tastings and masterclasses from any winemaker in town. It is central and within easy reach of about 20 of my sommeliers and last week we had tastings with Maltby & Greek and Les Caves de Pyrène.’
Then Ball turned interrogator. ‘What do you think is the future of the iPad as a wine list?’ I stammered a reply before Ball continued, ‘I know that they were extremely popular post COVID but that was because they’re sterile and easily cleanable. I believe that they have more to offer and that their potential is still to be developed.’ We touched on their relative clarity and the fact that the print on certain wine lists, such as that of Oma, reviewed recently, is often too small, plus the obvious difficulty when it comes to comparing wines on different ‘pages’ of an iPad.
Ball’s curiosity is based on knowledge of his customers and his experience and centres on the fundamental challenges facing everybody in restaurant management: how does the restaurant first establish contact with the customer? How does the restaurant make the customer feel relaxed and confident in spending £200 on a bottle of fine white burgundy?
It was breaking down this relationship that propelled Ball to his current position. He began his career working part-time at the Hotel du Vin in his native Birmingham where he fell in love with hospitality. He then came down to London where he started working behind the main bar of The Ivy restaurant. It was this first-hand experience which led him to appreciate the importance of making the customer feel at home immediately.
‘It’s what makes, and I admit that this is something of a generalisation, Americans on the whole a pleasure to deal with. They want to be part of the fun and making them feel at home is relatively easy. That is because they rely so much on the brands of drinks they enjoy. This is what I learnt working at the bar at The Ivy’, Ball explained.
It was knowledge that he put to good use. According to one leading wine supplier, David A Harvey of Raeburn, Ball was the first to realise and quantify how analysing customer behaviour, by watching the sales and product mix, could boost sales. His analyses fell on receptive ears and results followed swiftly. ‘The Ivy was known for selling bottles of wine for £60 maximum, maybe reaching £100 on Saturday evenings’, said Harvey, ‘but Ball, with a knack for data and an excellent eye soon increased this, with the restaurant selling £100 bottles every evening.’
Although Ball admitted to ‘loving experimenting with wine on every list’ he acknowledged that as a company they were best known for selling Côte d’Or white burgundy at Scott’s, J Sheekey and Sexy Fish in particular. (‘Although we sell an awful lot of Chablis, Sancerre and Gavi’, he added). The recent price rises that took village Meursault and Puligny from £150 closer to £250 on a wine list ‘left a gap for other wines to fill. Our village Chablis has not gone up in price over the past three years, for instance, and the gap is also being filled by Chardonnays from Oregon, by South African Chenin Blancs and by Assyrtikos from Greece, of which we have made a speciality here at Bacchanalia.’
What excites Ball is the contrast between the restaurants currently in the group and the group’s continual expansion. They will reopen Le Caprice in the new Rosewood Hotel in Grosvenor Square in September 2025 with a new and different wine list, and they will also open another branch of Scott’s in Dubai. ‘I have a soft spot for Sheekey’s’, he admitted. ‘And I love the setting and the food of Scott’s in Richmond [Tom Fraser there was the only chef he mentioned by name]. And Scott’s in Mayfair is unique, and not just for the fact that it is the only restaurant in the group not to have any background music. Opening Sexy Fish in Dubai brought me into contact not just with customers from many different backgrounds but also the staff there who are extremely hard-working and equally ambitious.’
I asked whether the size of the company he was buying for was ever an obstacle to what he might want to buy. ‘Not really’, came the reply, ‘but it is the paucity of the allocations that sometimes annoys me. For example, I’m a big fan of the Ignaccio Rosso di Montalcino from Il Marinetto and I remember recommending it to a regular customer who was going to Scott’s in Richmond before an international rugby match. It turned out that he was with a number of friends and they liked the wine so much they drank the entire allocation. I had to beg for more.’
Ball is only too aware that in his current position, he sits ‘on the shoulders of those who have gone before’ and in particular those of Fernando Peire who was at The Ivy for almost 30 years. He also spoke most enthusiastically of Xavier Landais, the group's beverage director with whom he has worked for several years, and the importance of teamwork to a well-run restaurant. But today, he acknowledged, sommeliers face a new challenge. ‘For the first time in my career, demand is falling as the price of wines increase and customers begin to enjoy moderation and even abstinence. We need to work even harder.’
Even Ball was having a modestly dry January as we enjoyed only a glass each of Filipa Pato & William Wouters’ 2023 DNMC Bical/Arinto from Portugal’s Bairrada (£15) with our excellent pappardelle with a duck ragu. It was chosen from a fascinating wine list though.
Bacchanalia 1 Mount Street, London W1K 3NA; tel: +44 (0)20 3161 9720
Nick writes about restaurants every Sunday. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.