Rotating our wine list to champion emerging winemakers

A wine list is often treated as a static document, printed once and left untouched until the next seasonal overhaul. We take a different view at Ebury, where the cellar behaves more like a living notebook than a fixed catalogue. The bottles that arrive each week reflect conversations with growers, importers, and the small-scale producers who are redefining what a working winery can look like. Every few weeks, a card disappears and a new one takes its place, written in the same careful hand.

Because our kitchen draws on Lebanese traditions, the wine list has always leaned toward producers who favour freshness, lower intervention, and food-friendly acidity. Yet the list also serves a wider purpose. Ebury exists to support young people moving out of temporary accommodation through the Fat Macy's training programme, and the cellar operates with the same long view. When we champion a new producer, we are giving that winemaker the same kind of platform we offer our trainees: a credible stage, an audience, and time to grow.

Sitting in London, we still pay close attention to what is happening in places like the Yarra Valley, Margaret River, and the Adelaide Hills. Australian producers have been among the most adventurous in the southern hemisphere for decades, and the country's relaxed approach to experimentation maps neatly onto our own. Visitors from Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth often tell us they feel at home with our shorter-intervention bottles, since the Australian market has shaped many of them.

The following pages explain why we treat the list as a moving thing, what we mean by emerging, and how the rotation shapes both the dining experience and the producers themselves. It is also a small argument for why diners, wherever they happen to live, might want to ask their local restaurant how often the list changes and who decides what makes the cut.

What an emerging producer actually means

The word emerging gets used loosely. To some buyers it means anyone who has released fewer than five vintages. To others it means anyone under a certain age, or anyone whose bottles have not yet landed in the big supermarket chains. None of these definitions feel quite right for our purposes. A producer is emerging for us when they are still working out who they are, still shaping their own style, and still reachable by phone or email without going through a marketing department.

Scale matters less than trajectory. A small winery that has been quietly bottling the same two wines for thirty years is not emerging in the sense we use the term. A label that has attracted serious attention may already be moving beyond the emerging category. The sweet spot is somewhere in between: enough confidence to bottle consistently, enough humility to keep learning, and enough financial pressure to keep the price approachable.

Importers play a quiet but essential role. We work with a handful of small merchants in London who travel to regions such as the Mornington Peninsula, the Granite Belt, and the Macedon Ranges, and who bring back samples long before the wines reach the press. Without those partnerships, our rotation would shrink dramatically. With them, we can feature producers whose total annual output fits comfortably inside a single shipping container.

The story behind each bottle

A wine list that rotates quickly offers an unusual gift: it forces us to tell the story while it is still fresh. When a producer's bottle is on the card for three months, we have time to visit the vineyard, share a meal, or at least exchange a few long emails. That conversation often finds its way to the floor, where our team can speak about the wine without having to memorise a script. Diners notice the difference between a list assembled by a sommelier who has tasted the wine and one assembled by an algorithm.

This kind of storytelling also dovetails with our training programme. The young people who join us for the 200-hour rotation often come in with little knowledge of wine, and within weeks they are explaining to a table why a particular red from Beechworth pairs well with our lamb arayes. The rotating list gives them a reason to learn, and a reason to remember.

For producers, the emotional value is harder to measure but easy to see. When we list a new winemaker and they sell out within a fortnight, the news travels back to their region. We have watched a tiny Tasmanian sparkling project gain traction in the UK after a single season on our card, simply because diners talked about it on the way home.

Pairing with Lebanese-inspired small plates

The food side of the restaurant influences everything we pour. Our small plates draw on Lebanese traditions of grilling, slow cooking, and bright herbal finishes, so the wines need to handle smoke, char, citrus, and yogurt without losing their footing. Rotation matters because the same producer in a different vintage can shift dramatically, and a list that updates slowly tends to drift away from what the kitchen is actually serving.

Seasonality drives the rotation almost as much as producer discoveries do. When tomatoes and aubergines arrive at their peak, we lean toward lighter reds and rosés from cool climates. When we are leaning into slow-cooked lamb and charred meats, we reach for skin-contact whites and rustic reds from hotter sites. Our recent piece on the best vegetables to grill for a Lebanese barbecue speaks to the same logic, since the vegetables that shine over coals tend to call for the same kind of bright, savoury bottle as a slow-braised shoulder.

Lebanon itself has a long winemaking history that often goes unspoken in London, with ancient cellars in the Bekaa Valley still producing from indigenous varieties like obeidi and merweh. We try to include at least one Lebanese producer in every rotation cycle, partly because of the food and partly because of the story. The list becomes a small atlas, and a small atlas helps a meal feel like a journey.

Learning from the Australian wine scene

Australia has become a particularly useful reference point for anyone thinking about emerging producers. The country's regulatory framework, administered through Wine Australia and the Label Integrity Programme, makes it relatively easy for new entrants to register, label, and sell their wines without waiting for a wealthy distributor. That openness has produced a steady stream of newcomers in regions such as the Hilltops, the Pyrenees, and the broader Swan District, and it has shaped a generation of drinkers who expect novelty.

Australian drinking habits have shifted noticeably over the past decade. A pattern of casual weeknight bottles, often from regional cellars rather than supermarket chains, has replaced some of the older weekend rituals. This is partly generational and partly the result of new licensing rules in New South Wales and Victoria that have made small producers easier to visit and easier to buy from. The same habits are slowly reshaping London's dining rooms, particularly in areas with a strong Australian expat presence.

We have featured several Australian producers over the past year, including a pét-nat from the Strathbogie Ranges and a chardonnay from a quiet pocket of Geelong that we picked up through a small importer. Each of those bottles sold faster than we had forecast, which tells us that diners are increasingly comfortable with a wider map than the classic French-German axis. The rotation gives us room to follow that appetite.

The rhythm of a six-week cycle

Our cycle runs roughly every six weeks, although we adjust it around bank holidays and the rhythm of the kitchen. The first week is for tasting: every producer currently on the card returns to the table alongside two or three newcomers. The second week is for discussion with our front-of-house team, who flag any bottle that has been difficult to explain or hard to sell. The third and fourth weeks are for sales, while the fifth is for paperwork and the sixth for changeover.

Removing a wine from the list is rarely a punishment. Sometimes a producer has simply grown beyond the stage where they need our help. Sometimes a wine has sold well enough that our allocation would be unfair to other buyers. Sometimes a vintage simply does not match what the kitchen is currently cooking. The discipline of removal matters as much as the discipline of addition.

For diners, the result is a list that feels attentive rather than exhaustive. There are usually around twenty wines by the glass, with another forty or fifty on the bottle list. Nothing sits on the card long enough to gather dust, and the producers who do appear have usually been touched by someone in the building. That rhythm also keeps our team honest: there is no hiding behind a list that has not changed in three years.

Practical notes for visitors curious about the rotation

• Book for a Tuesday or Wednesday evening if you want to taste the widest range; the team has more time to walk you through the current card and to pour comparison flights.
• Ask which producers are about to leave the list, since bottles at the end of a cycle are often sold at a small discount and are a useful way to try a maker you might not otherwise reach for.
• Look for the small printed cards that describe each producer in our handwriting; they are updated each cycle and reflect our genuine, sometimes slightly opinionated, notes.
• Let us know if there is a particular wine you cannot find anywhere else; we sometimes hold a bottle or two back for regulars who ask in advance.
• Bring a friend who likes to disagree; our list is built to start conversations, and the rotation is meant to keep those conversations alive.