Northants, Leics &amp; Rutland

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1000" height="846" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/The-Plough-Everdon-front-elevation.jpg" alt="The Plough Everdon gastropub with wine list" class="wp-image-61058" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/The-Plough-Everdon-front-elevation.jpg 1000w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/The-Plough-Everdon-front-elevation-300x254.jpg 300w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/The-Plough-Everdon-front-elevation-768x650.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></figure>



If your wine order is more stuck-in-a-rut than sommelier-chic, we’ve got just the person to unstick it. Enter&nbsp;David Webster, the experienced sommelier behind the 200-strong wine list at&nbsp;<a href="https://theplougheverdon.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Plough</a> in Everdon – a welcoming foodie pub with serious sustainability credentials.



David&#8217;s here to gently prise that fusty old Malbec out of your mitt (no judgement of course) and nudge you towards something a bit more thrilling. Whether you’re clinging to your rosé like it’s a floatation device or always defaulting to Prosecco, he’s got fresh, food-friendly and surprisingly affordable swaps to elevate your glass and your dinner. We sat down in the cosy bar, looking out onto the gorgeous pub garden, to chat about his journey and what he says you&nbsp;should&nbsp;be ordering to complement that succulent pork belly from <a href="https://www.boarshillfarm.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Boarshill Farm</a> (a native and rare breeds farm right here in the village) or a autumnal risotto made with pumpkins from nearby <a href="https://www.stoweheightsfarm.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Stowe Heights Farm</a>. 



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1000" height="599" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Plough-Everdon.jpg" alt="Plough Everdon wine" class="wp-image-61063" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Plough-Everdon.jpg 1000w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Plough-Everdon-300x180.jpg 300w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Plough-Everdon-768x460.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></figure>



How do you go about selecting the wines for your list?



We work really closely with our suppliers, whether meat, fish or vegetables. They&#8217;re each doing some really special things, so we try to do as little to the produce as possible in terms of how we present that on the plate, we just want to enhance it by selecting wines that will really complement the flavours of each dish. Our wine list is ninety percent European, which is driven by food miles primarily, but also because of the rich history of wine production we have here in Europe that goes back thousands of years. It makes sense for us to harness that. 



There&#8217;s a price point consideration, of course, not necessarily from a profitability point of view, but we understand that there are certain wines that will suit the consumer more at certain times in the week. What someone wants to splash out on a Monday night will probably differ from what they&#8217;re thinking of spending at the weekend, or for a family celebration. For us to find value we often go slightly off the beaten track and seek out things that customers might not have tried before. We won&#8217;t generally offer your basic level Sauvignon Blanc or Malbec but, if you do want something that&#8217;s at a more accessible price point, we&#8217;ll suggest something like a Carignan instead, so our wines by the glass aren&#8217;t completely conventional but we can offer a slightly more interesting experience in that way. 



As the season changes and Autumn sets in, our menu will change to reflect that, so you&#8217;ll see more braises and root vegetable and, in accordance with that, our wines by the glass will change too. We also offer a Wine of the Week, something different and unusual. We recently had a Canarian white wine that, if it&#8217;s just on the wine list, you know it&#8217;ll get overlooked as it&#8217;s a bit of an unknown, but as the Wine of the Week it invited people to enjoy trying something new and unusual. 



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1000" height="1250" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Supper-Club-wine-pairings-the-plough.jpg" alt="Supper Club Wine pairings the plough Everdon" class="wp-image-61065" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Supper-Club-wine-pairings-the-plough.jpg 1000w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Supper-Club-wine-pairings-the-plough-240x300.jpg 240w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Supper-Club-wine-pairings-the-plough-819x1024.jpg 819w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Supper-Club-wine-pairings-the-plough-768x960.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Supper Club wine pairings at The Plough</figcaption></figure>



You host a monthly supper club, are you building those around the wines?



We always try to have a winemaker here for the event as it really adds to the experience for our guests and brings an element of romance to it &#8211; it&#8217;s so enriching to hear directly from the person who walks through the vineyards each day &#8211; and then we&#8217;ll build the menu around that with our style very much central to that, but if we&#8217;re using a southern Italian producer, for example, we&#8217;ll give a nod to southern Italian food. We&#8217;ve got one coming in October that&#8217;s driven by <a href="https://www.gerard-bertrand.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Gérard Bertrand</a>, who&#8217;s a southern French producer, actually a former French international rugby player, whose family have been making wine for generations. So for this event, they&#8217;ll be the featured wine producer and then we&#8217;ve teamed up with Boarshill Farm, who are supplying us with an entire cow, so the meal will focus on beef and dairy. We find that these events are an opportunity for us to be quite adventurous with our menu. So, for example, at our July Supper Club, we did a rabbit terrine stuffed with lobster. It sounds like a whacky combination but when the winemaker is there explaining to you that the rabbits hop around their vineyards and they&#8217;re just a mile from the sea, the story starts to come together and the flavours make sense. 



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="768" height="1024" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/PLOUGH-EVERDON-REVIEW-003-768x1024.jpg" alt="Gerard Bertrand" class="wp-image-61079" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/PLOUGH-EVERDON-REVIEW-003-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/PLOUGH-EVERDON-REVIEW-003-225x300.jpg 225w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/PLOUGH-EVERDON-REVIEW-003.jpg 1000w" sizes="(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" /></figure>



We like to have interesting and unusual wines that you don&#8217;t find in the local supermarket, but we have to be able to sell those, so we do that by engaging with our customers and the Supper Clubs are one way of doing that. 



Some of your customers must walk in expecting to order a glass of their usual supermarket plonk. Do you think people ever get blinded by choice?



Everything we do is driven by wanting to have a conversation with you, so if you want to come and have a glass of wine on a Monday night with your girlfriends, you probably want something a bit lower in alcohol as it&#8217;s early in the week, something light and refreshing, we can recommend something to suit, such as a Vinho Verde. If your Mum&#8217;s come in and she wants a glass of Merlot, why does she want to have Merlot? Well, it&#8217;s probably low in tannins, it&#8217;s fruit-driven and it&#8217;s easy drinking, do you know what? We&#8217;ve got a Primitivo from North Macedonia that does all of those things, it&#8217;s less expensive than the Merlot and it&#8217;s an interesting new thing to try. 



We want to have that interaction, we don&#8217;t expect you to know every wine on the menu in detail, but we&#8217;d love to tell you about the ones we think you&#8217;ll enjoy. We want that to enhance your experience of being here, our business is about making people feel comfortable and relaxed, after all. 



How did you come to be interested in wine initially?



I&#8217;m from a working class family with no real exposure to wine. I was quite a naughty fifteen year old and my sister-in-law was a pastry chef at Le Manoir, so my Dad got sick of dragging me out of scrapes and I got packed off there to wash up. I worked out pretty quickly that the person getting shouted at the least was the sommelier, so I pestered him for a couple of years and, after I finished school, I ended up doing my apprenticeship there, often polishing wine glasses for hours and hours, putting deliveries away in the cellar. After that, I went on to do my qualifications with the <a href="https://www.wsetglobal.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Wine and Spirits Education Trust</a>, an organisation that we now send all our senior staff to as well. 



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1000" height="648" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Le-Manoir.jpg" alt="Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons" class="wp-image-61069" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Le-Manoir.jpg 1000w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Le-Manoir-300x194.jpg 300w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Le-Manoir-768x498.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">David began his career in hospitality at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat&#8217;Saisons in Oxfordshire</figcaption></figure>



Any tips on what to order next time we pop in?



We&#8217;ve just taken on a new Head Chef, Andy, who joins us from <a href="https://www.lenclume.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">L&#8217;Enclume</a>, which is Simon Rogan&#8217;s restaurant in Cartmel up in Cumbria, where they have their own farm (and three Michelin Stars), so he&#8217;s really on board with our ethos in terms of local, seasonal produce and he&#8217;s bringing in plenty of new ideas. There&#8217;s a natural rotation, certainly from a protein point of view, so that will determine what&#8217;s on the menu. 



How we offer value to customers is a key factor, so a slow cooked piece of beef from the cheek can be just a good a value as a fillet steak, it&#8217;s all about how you serve that to the customer, so try something different to what you&#8217;d usually order. Because we generally buy the whole animal, we have to use everything. If we have pork belly on the menu, for example, we have to look at how we use the rest of the animal in a way that the customer doesn&#8217;t feel there&#8217;s obvious repetition. That could mean including pork chops on Mondays and Tuesdays as part of our set-price menu, and we&#8217;ll use the legs to cure to make hams.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1000" height="1000" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Ajo-Blanco-mint-grapes-jamon.jpg" alt="Ajo Blanco, mint, grapes, jamon Supper Club the Plough Everdon" class="wp-image-61073" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Ajo-Blanco-mint-grapes-jamon.jpg 1000w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Ajo-Blanco-mint-grapes-jamon-300x300.jpg 300w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Ajo-Blanco-mint-grapes-jamon-150x150.jpg 150w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Ajo-Blanco-mint-grapes-jamon-768x768.jpg 768w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Ajo-Blanco-mint-grapes-jamon-500x500.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></figure>



In turn, what you might have something different and interesting to drink to pair with your food and we do have a Coravin system for our wines, which allows you to pour the wine without removing the cork, so we can offer any of our wines by the glass, even the more expensive ones. We appreciate that we&#8217;re in a very rural spot and some of our customers might be driving and want just a small glass of wine rather than a whole bottle, but they still want something decent. It also means you can try something different with each course. 



So if I was having the sardines as a starter and I&#8217;d usually opt for a Whispering Angel, what would you be encouraging me to have as a more interesting alternative?



We have a South African rosé, which is made from a Cinsaut, a grape that features strongly in Provence rosés. Whispering Angel is a great example of paying for a brand name and the influencer lifestyle, but this rose is equal to it, delicious and it&#8217;s less pricey. We want you to try something different, you&#8217;re having sardines cooked with tomatoes from Stowe Heights and the berry fruits and the acidity will go really well with the fattiness of the sardines and cope well with the tomato acidity too.



What&#8217;s your preferred wine region?



Oh, Italy. If you look at our wine list I suppose there&#8217;s probably more Italian wines on there than any other area and it&#8217;s great for variety purposes, every little pocket has it&#8217;s own grape that it really champions. Our House Red is a Salice Salentino, which is predominately Primitivo and that area is the best Primitvo, probably in the world, but if you go up the coast a couple of hundred kilometres, all of a sudden you&#8217;re into Sangiovese territory. That&#8217;s why I love it, the amazing variety. I really want our customers to engage in the emotions of the wine, however clichéd that sounds. If it&#8217;s produced in a sunny vineyard in Italy, we want to transport you there, with grapes ripening on the vine. We want you to savour that moment. 



And your favourite wine?



I love a Zweigelt, which is an Austrian red, a bit like a Pinot Noir, that&#8217;s my lunchtime or midweek wine, if I want something slightly lighter, a bit more fruit involved that isn&#8217;t going to whack me out if I want a glass at the end of the day. I like everything, pretty much, with the exception of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. I want a wine in balance. We&#8217;ve just got a new wine on the list that&#8217;s a Montepulciano made by two Australian lads, the packaging is really funky, the bottles are all wax sealed because their mate owns a crayon factory and they&#8217;re using the the waste wax, which gives it a bit of a cool factor on top of it being a really great wine. 



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1000" height="1000" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Rioja-The-Plough-Evrdon.jpg" alt="Rioja The Plough Everdon" class="wp-image-61074" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Rioja-The-Plough-Evrdon.jpg 1000w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Rioja-The-Plough-Evrdon-300x300.jpg 300w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Rioja-The-Plough-Evrdon-150x150.jpg 150w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Rioja-The-Plough-Evrdon-768x768.jpg 768w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/northantsleicsrutland/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2025/09/Rioja-The-Plough-Evrdon-500x500.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></figure>



So, if New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc is the world&#8217;s most overrated wine, what&#8217;s the most underrated?



Rioja doesn&#8217;t get as much appreciation as it should. Southern Italian reds are a really safe option &#8211; you can put a bottle on the table and it offers so much bang for your buck. New World wines have a price point that doesn&#8217;t match the quality and that&#8217;s largely down to logistics &#8211; to get it from there to here costs money &#8211; we try to find value in everything, so those lovely little southern parts of Europe like Croatia and Slovenia make great wines, because they&#8217;ve been making it for thousands of years. 



<a href="https://theplougheverdon.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Plough</a>, High St, Everdon, Daventry, Northamptonshire, NN11 3DT







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