In 2012, aged just 19, Alessandra Tasca moved from Puglia to the UK with no real interest in hospitality. Fourteen years later she is Head of Wine for OMA and AGORA, and curating the wine list for the new sister restaurant, KID.
Unsure about what to study at university and toying with Political Sciences or Modern Literature, Tasca decided to first take a year abroad to improve her English, packing her bags to head to the UK. Admitting that the low level of her English meant her choice of jobs was limited, she started working in junior roles between the front and back of house. She worked in a couple of restaurants before joining Mezzet in Hampton Court, where they were impressed by her attitude and pushed her out onto the floor, and it was there she started to grow her passion for wine. Run by a Lebanese-Spanish couple, there was a lot of wine from both countries on the list. “As a southern Italian girl I had never had access to any of that,” Tasca says, explaining that the wine she knew and loved was the local wine from her home region of Puglia.
At Mezzet she went on to work behind the bar, taking charge of wine orders and becoming passionate about wine. But it was at The Dairy in Clapham that she really caught the wine bug. In January 2015 she moved from Mezzet, a local neighbourhood restaurant, to The Dairy, a restaurant with a strong reputation in the industry. “I discovered that hospitality is passion, care, people trying to do things the right way,” she says. With a focus on natural wines, Tasca encountered bottles that made her want to work in wine. The Dairy, she says, fully formed her professionally, giving her experience as a waitress, bartender, AGM and sommelier. She became General Manager in 2018, and continued to curate the wine list as she didn’t employ a sommelier:
“If I hadn’t found The Dairy, I wouldn’t be in hospitality today: it was the restaurant that made me decide it’s what I wanted to do.”
Turning around & tough calls
In 2020, a week after the painful call to tell her staff that what had begun as lockdown furlough was now going to be a permanent closure of the Clapham restaurant, Tasca’s boss Robin Gill called to ask if she would open a new site for The Dairy in Bermondsey. Being able to call her staff again, this time with job offers, was “a huge relief”. Most of the team stayed in place to open the Bermondsey site in September 2020, with Tasca as both General Manager and Wine Buyer.
In July 2022, Tasca decided to leave to follow her passion for wine. Having studied for her WSET Level 3, she realised she wanted to know how wine is really made, and headed to Italy for two months to take part in a vintage, first in Sicily with Nino Barraco near Marsala, someone Tasca describes as an inspiration, and one of the producers that made her fall in love with wine at The Dairy. The second month was spent in Piemonte with a small producer called Tenuta Foresto in Nizza Monferrato, where she discovered a love for Barbera:
“Barbera is a grape that will stay in my heart forever,” she says.
The return to London
A third month in Campania had to be put to one side when Tasca was offered a job at Modal Wine, a wine importer back in London, where she hoped to learn the other side of the industry. Realising it was not the place for her, she nevertheless met Emily Acha Derrington, the wine buyer at Manteca in Shoreditch. Tasca started to work at Manteca as Wine and Bar Manager in 2023, with the plan to move to OMA and AGORA as soon as the site was open.
Working on the opening of OMA was “very exciting” as she had never worked on an opening of that calibre. She reflects that she has never lost her love for a low intervention and biodynamic philosophy that she discovered at The Dairy, but she is determined not to become dogmatic about it, “so now I can say yes to natural wine, but not if it is faulty”. She believes in the importance of truly understanding a producer before listing their wines.
OMA and AGORA opened in April 2024 in the same building, with AGORA inspired by an Athenian market and OMA by the Greek islands. Tasca clearly loves the energy there, calling it “a very special thing.” AGORA has a concise list, focused on Greek wines and food pairing: “approachability is our mantra,” while at OMA the 420-bin list is inspired by the sea, spanning coastal, island and inland wines, as well as those aged under the sea. It is a list that has earned OMA not one but two Star Wine List accolades, a global Silver for Best Newcomer in 2025 and a global Gold for the UK Special Jury Prize this June.
A new site, KID, will open on 1 September, so Tasca has been hard at work on the new list. The restaurant is a collaboration with chef Sertaç Dirik, with the menu drawing on his Turkish heritage, so the wine list will certainly include some Turkish wines. A large tome on Turkish wines sits in her bag when we meet, and Tasca says she has been studying and is excited to learn more, admitting, “I didn’t know much about Greek wines either…but now I feel like an ambassador for Greek wine!”
Wine Wish
If granted a wish by a wine fairy, Tasca says she would like to retaste a wine that she tasted in 2022. It was Scarpa La Bogliona Barbera d’Asti 1993, her birth vintage. “To find that Barbera was so age-worthy, so beautiful and still so alive after almost 30 years, for me it was mind-blowing,” she says.
So what does the future hold for her? “I have a lot of plans for the company, so if everything goes well, I’m planning to stay there for a long time” she says. When asked about a possible return to Puglia, Tasca says she would only consider that to open her own place, and the more time she spends in London the more she thinks of it as home.
