Welcome to HG Wines

HG Wines was set up in 1999 by Trevor Gulliver and Fergus Henderson of the St. John restaurants in London ( www.stjohnrestaurant.com ). Trevor was no longer happy with the quality, range and price of wines available through traditional sources in London. Our consideration has to be with the wine and the vigneron not logistics or an all-world wine list.

Originally wines were purchased for a few private clients and for St. John and latterly St. John Bread and Wine, now with off sales at both sites, a happy list of private clients, several restaurant clients, some agencies and an En Primeur operation, HG Wines has grown.

We recruited internally with Neil Irvine running the department, click here to contact us.

On the wines just a few words, it is our aim to seek out like minded vignerons, quite often working on marginal properties, quite often a little mad but nearly always evangelical. We are not interested in volumes unless, as is often the case, they have not enough wine. The vignerons may be organic, biodynamic, very small or even really quite large, the wine and the attitude is the thing. Our St. John lists are all French and, we believe, with good reason (e-mail Trevor on tg@stjohnrestaurant.com, he’ll be happy to discuss!) but we also do source and provide other wines quite happily and Trevor is often asked to introduce wines to merchants here by other producers on his travels. Finally we believe that we have a role to be a “vitrine”, a shop window, for those wines, which would otherwise never make it here. We seek to echo the same philosophy with our wines as with our food and its provenance.

Own label St. John wines.

We enjoy getting fully involved in the process, particularly when “house wine selections” are put in our face (you just choose the label!), going straight off to our growers and producing wines that are better, and better priced!

For our customers who buy at the restaurants or through our wine desk we seek to be enthusiastic about what we do, to offer a good service (this does not stop at wines, it can be ales, digestifs, bread from our bakery even) and to enjoy it ourselves. We do do the groundwork and enjoy seeing the fruits of our labours!

How to buy our wines

Most of our wines are available to buy by the bottle from the Wine Shops at our Smithfield and Spitalfields restaurants. The prices on these pages are for purchases of 12 bottles plus. We are happy to put together mixed cases. 

Instructions on how to make a purchase can be found when you have made your choice.

Wine sourcing service

If there is a particular wine you would like us to find for you please go to the Contact us page on the side menu.

Locator

The Locator function on the menu can be used to not only find where our wines and producers come from, but also places to stay, eat and visit that we recommend. Whilst on our travels we visit a sizeable number of hotels, restaurants and the like (not all of them worth visiting mind) and on these pages we will be putting details of some worth a visit. This is work in progress - naturally.