Wine

The wine list in Café Paradiso has grown over the years from an initial stock of twelve popular bottles to around fifty carefully chosen wines, and is constantly evolving. The reason for this is simple: we love to buy wine, we love to drink wine, we even like to sell it, and an encouraging number of our customers seem to like drinking it too. Because the food menus are vegetarian as well as eclectic, the wine list has taken shape gradually from a combination of our personal tastes and a need to accumulate wines that will complement the wide range of tastes in the food. The wine list is, of course, all the more idiosyncratic due to Bridget’s total ban on French wines since the bombing of the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior ship in Auckland Harbour in 1985, a gesture which she enjoys all the more when wine-francophiles see it as single-issue and provocative. Wines are added to the list, and dropped, through an ongoing very personal process of reading, tasting and talking involving Bridget, Sarah and Jean, our suppliers Kevin Parsons and Joe Karwig and some very dedicated customers. I like the organic nature of this: we help people to choose what they will drink of an evening, and their feedback helps us to build and maintain our wine list.