Wines on Tap

Something we regularly get asked is “What are all the taps for?”

Fair question!

They’re a pretty big feature of the room and sit right at the centre of the restaurant, so many people naturally assume they’re all pouring beer…and whilst a couple are exactly what you’d expect, beer and water, the majority are actually pouring wine.

We’re big fans of wine on tap…

Anyone who has shopped next door at Plenty will know this already, as we installed wine on tap there right from the beginning. At the time it still felt relatively unusual, but over the past few years the quality and range of wines available in keg has improved enormously and we think it’s one of the genuinely positive changes happening in the wine world.

The wines themselves arrive in reusable 20 or 30 litre kegs which we store downstairs in the cellar…there are lots of practical benefits to this…

Firstly, there’s the environmental side. Glass bottles are expensive to produce, heavy to transport and energy intensive to recycle. Kegs massively reduce all of that. One 20 litre keg removes the need for around 16kg of glass, 26 capsules, corks and labels, plus around 1.6kg of cardboard packaging…which adds up fast!

Then there’s the restaurant side of things.

Wine in keg isn’t exposed to oxygen in the same way as wine in an open bottle, so it stays fresh for much longer. That means fewer half-finished bottles being poured away after a couple of days on the bar…always a sad result!

This efficiency allows us to offer a much bigger and more interesting selection of wines by the glass, something we care about a lot.

It also means we can happily let guests taste a few different wines before deciding what they’d like to drink with dinner…which is absolutely how wine should be enjoyed in our view!

Without the tap system we’d either end up wasting significantly more wine or keeping the by-the-glass list much shorter and safer.

All of these savings on glass, packaging, transport and wastage also mean that keg wines can represent really excellent value. More of what you’re paying for ends up being the actual wine in your glass rather than the associated costs of shipping and packaging that sit around it in the supply chain.

As keg wine has become more popular, more and more excellent producers have started using the format too.

The Mâcon-Villages we have on tap at the moment is a great example. Proper white Burgundy from a brilliant producer, now available by the glass with less waste running through the system and at a genuinely approachable price point. More importantly…it’s absolutely delicious!

Alongside that we’ve currently got a red Castelão from a Portuguese producer we really admire, plus an orange wine from the same winery which is tasting particularly good now the weather has warmed up!

Tap wines are never going to replace bottles entirely, especially when it comes to wines designed for long ageing, which simply doesn’t work in the same way in keg. But they are becoming an increasingly important part of the wine industry and something we’ve always been keen to support.

And as a final shameless plug…we always have four tap wines available next door at Plenty. You can fill up a bottle with whatever takes your fancy and then bring it back to refill time and time again!

Cheers!