Building a short wine list for a small restaurant in Andalusia
The wine list at Fervores has thirty-one references. It has never had more than thirty-five. Keeping it short is a deliberate choice, and it involves saying no to a lot of wines that are perfectly good.
Why thirty-one and not more
A short list forces a decision. Every bottle on it has to earn its place, which means something else has to come off when a new wine comes in. This creates a useful discipline: Gonzalo cannot add a wine he is merely interested in. He has to be willing to remove something he already likes.
It also makes the list manageable for a two-person floor team. If the list were eighty bottles, the servers would need to memorise eighty descriptions or rely on a printed sheet. With thirty-one, they know every wine well enough to talk about it honestly.
The Andalusian bias and its limits
Most of the list is from Andalusia and Castilla. There are a few bottles from other regions, currently including a Galician Albarino and a Rioja that Gonzalo has been buying for four years and cannot bring himself to remove. The Andalusian wines are not there as a regional statement. They are there because they pair well with the food, which is also Andalusian in its ingredients and its flavour profile.
The Manzanilla from Sanlucar de Barrameda that joined the list in July 2026 is a good example of the logic. It is saline, dry, and low in alcohol. It works with the gazpacho, the goat's cheese, and the cured meats. It would not work with the presa iberica, which needs something with more body.
How the notes get written
Gonzalo writes the tasting notes in a physical notebook, the same one he uses for the weekly menu. The notes are short: two or three sentences, no scores, no comparisons to famous wines. The goal is to give the reader enough to make a decision, not to demonstrate expertise.
The notebook is not the version that appears on the printed list. Someone transcribes it each quarter. But the handwritten version is the original, and occasionally a note from the notebook makes it to the table verbatim, which is either charming or unprofessional depending on who you ask.
The list will probably stay around thirty-one. There is a version of this restaurant with a cellar and a sommelier, and it is a fine restaurant. It is just not this one.