The Pairing Flight at Alchemist

Across a meal this long, a wine pairing has to do more than simply match flavours course by course — it has to pace an entire evening. Alchemist's list moves across wine, sake and house-made ferments, and by the time you reach the final act it feels less like a sequence of pours and more like its own parallel storyline running alongside the food.

What surprised me most was the non-alcoholic side of the programme, internally referred to at the restaurant as “NoLo.” It isn't a courtesy add-on for non-drinkers; the team clearly treats it as its own serious craft, building zero-proof pairings from fermentation, distillation and house cordials with the same attention given to the wine list. I switched between the two across the evening and neither felt like the compromise option.

If you're booking and know in advance that you'd prefer a non-alcoholic pairing, it's worth mentioning it when you reserve rather than deciding at the table — from what I could tell, that gives the sommelier team time to build the sequence properly rather than swap things out on the fly.

I'm not a sommelier and I won't pretend to have tasting notes worth publishing. What I can say is that the pairing consistently avoided the trap of matching intensity with intensity — the quieter pours arrived exactly when the food needed a break, and the louder ones showed up for the courses built to be loud.