Dutch wine list awards go short as often as long

Restaurant ML in Haarlem has won the Gold Star for the best short wine list in the Netherlands, a category reserved for selections of fewer than 200 references.

The award came from Star Wine List of the Year, an international competition judged by sommeliers and wine buyers, which revealed its Dutch Gold Stars in Rotterdam in late September. Restaurant ML's list beat ten other finalists, among them Café Lily in Groningen and Cour des Vins, also in Haarlem.

Four ways to win a Gold Star

A good wine list is a pull factor. I'm convinced of it.

The Netherlands edition splits its wine lists into categories by length as much as by style. Flore, in Amsterdam, took both Best Long List and Best Sparkling Wine List. Restaurant Wils, also in Amsterdam, won Best Medium-Sized List. Ciel Bleu, at the Hotel Okura, won Best By-the-Glass List.

Putting a 150-reference list and an 800-reference list into separate categories is itself a statement: the judges are not ranking size, they are ranking intent. A short list has to justify every bottle it keeps. A long one has to stay navigable despite its bulk.

Restaurant Wils and Flore share Amsterdam postcodes with Restaurant ML, but not its arithmetic, which is exactly the distinction the organisers built the categories to reward.

Why shorter is not safer

Koninklijke Horeca Nederland reported, days before the ceremony, that hospitality margins are razor-thin, according to Lukas Wiegman, the Netherlands' Best Sommelier in 2024, who runs the Rotterdam restaurant NOTK with fellow sommelier Thomas Traa.

Wiegman's point was about strategy rather than size. “A good wine list is a pull factor. I'm convinced of it,” he told the trade body, arguing that guests increasingly choose where to eat on the strength of what is poured, not only what is plated.

A short list forces that argument into the open faster than a long one does. Forty bottles chosen by one person read as a point of view. Four hundred read, at best, as an inventory, unless, like Flore's, they are organised well enough to win a prize of their own.

The Dutch and Belgian Gold Star winners now advance to the Star Wine List of the Year Global Final, set for June 2027, where this year's short list will be judged against the longest in the world.

For now, Restaurant ML has forty-odd reasons and one Gold Star. Flore has roughly twenty times as many bottles, and a Gold Star of its own.

More on Dutch and international wine lists: Wine List of the Year 2026 and Michelin Guide Netherlands 2026.