Pros and cons of the house wine

Do you order it or avoid it? We speak to two experts in the know

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Winelists can be incredibly daunting, whether they run to 10 pages and 200-bottle options, or are short but unintelligible, packed with niche-sounding grape varieties.

If you don’t consider yourself a wine aficionado, or just want something cold that won't break the bank, bar jabbing a finger at the list and hoping for the best, the chances are you'll plump for a glass of the house. But even this can be a fraught decision. After all, with a sommelier looming over you, isn’t it just a bit cheap to order the house? And doesn't it reveal you to be a complete wine dunce?

“No one likes to look cheap, do they?” says Katie Fecak, wine educator and owner of Cellar Door Social. It's a scenario that often leads people to order the second wine on the list instead. “But restaurants know people don’t want to look cheap, so the highest mark-up is normally on the second wine.”

So what else do you need to know when it comes to house wine?

A proper house wine will likely be branded

Some restaurants and hotels work with vineyards to produce their own, specific, branded house wine that you can often buy to take home. “It is a very good idea,” says Rémi Cousin, head sommelier at Wild in Hertfordshire, who was head sommelier at Michel Roux Jnr’s two-Michelin starred restaurant, Le Gavroche. “However, if restaurants are doing house wine just for the fact of having house wine, and your staff are not trained, they don’t taste the wine, they don’t know what they're talking about, if they don't know the location, the grapes, then it doesn’t make sense. If it’s just to have a cheap wine without quality control, it is letting down the establishment.”