Hedonism Wines

Hedonism opened in 2012 on Davies Street as a fine-wine retail cathedral on a scale London had not previously seen — three floors, six thousand wines, four thousand spirits, large-format Burgundy and Bordeaux on open display, a glass-floored fine-spirits room at the back. The Coravin tasting bar runs a constantly-rotating by-the-glass programme of grand cru and first-growth wines that would otherwise require buying the bottle — a 2010 Romanée-Saint-Vivant by the glass, a 1990 Yquem, a 1976 Macallan. Owned by Russian financier Yevgeny Chichvarkin; the buying programme is unconstrained by ordinary commercial logic. The chapter's destination retail visit for the bottle-on-the-mantelpiece purchase.