Hotel du Vin, St Andrews: the wine hotel on the Scores, two minutes from the first tee

A Victorian terrace on the town’s grandest street, with the sea in front, the castle at one end and the Old Course at the other — and a cellar that gives a whisky town something else to argue about over dinner.

The Scores is the street St Andrews keeps for best. It runs along the top of the cliff from the castle to the Links, a single row of Victorian villas and university halls with nothing on the other side but grass, a railing and the North Sea, and on a clear evening the light comes in low off the water and turns the whole terrace the colour of shortbread. Hotel du Vin has the building at the Links end, the one closest to the first tee. Stand at its front door and you can see the R&A clubhouse to your left, the West Sands running out to the estuary in front, and, if you turn round and look back along the street, the ruined tower of the castle where a cardinal was murdered in 1546. There are hotels in St Andrews with more history and one with more fame, but none with a better address.

What Hotel du Vin does with it is what it does everywhere: a bistro that cooks French with Scottish produce, a bar that takes wine as seriously as this town takes whisky, and bedrooms designed for people who intend to spend some time in them. It is a smaller, warmer, less formal proposition than the Old Course Hotel four hundred yards away, and for a certain kind of weekend — two people, no clubs, a long dinner — it is the better one.

Why go

For the street, first. Almost everything you have come to St Andrews for is within five minutes of the door: the first tee two, the West Sands three, the castle four, the cathedral and the three old streets seven or eight. You will not touch the car. Then for the scale. Forty-two rooms is enough to feel like a hotel and few enough that the staff know who you are by the second morning; guests here talk about the people who looked after them by name, which is not something that happens in the bigger houses.

And for the cellar. Hotel du Vin was built, as a brand, on the idea that a hotel could be organised around its wine list, and the St Andrews house keeps the faith: a sommelier on the floor, a list that runs deep into Burgundy and the Rhône without forgetting that half its guests would rather have a single malt, and a bar where a glass of something good arrives before you have finished taking your coat off. In a town that sells whisky on every corner, it is a pleasure to be somewhere that will talk to you about Chablis.

The room

The building was the St Andrews Golf Hotel for decades before Hotel du Vin took it on in 2014 and spent three and a half million pounds turning it into this, and a further million in 2024 and 2025 redoing every bedroom in soft greens and earth colours taken from the coast outside. The bones are Victorian — high ceilings, deep windows, a staircase built to be come down slowly — and the rooms in the original terrace are the ones to ask for. A Deluxe Sea View room on the front gives you the whole bay from the bed; the Junior Suites add a sitting area and a bath you can lie down in. Throughout, the beds are hand-sprung, the linen is Egyptian cotton, the showers are the drenching kind and there is a Lavazza machine for the morning. Eighteen rooms sit in a newer block behind, quieter and a little plainer, and cheaper for it.

One honest note. The hotel hosts weddings and functions at weekends, and a room near the function suite on a Saturday can be lively until midnight. If you are here to sleep, say so when you book, and ask for the front of the old building.

The table

Bistro du Vin is the reason a lot of people who are not staying here walk in. It is a proper bistro — banquettes, bare tables, wine bottles on every shelf — and the cooking is the French classics with Fife on the plate: East Neuk crab, Scottish beef done as steak frites, a fish of the day off the boats, and a cheese trolley that gets its own round of attention. Breakfast is the one meal guests grumble about, mostly on price; take it, but take it late, after a walk on the beach. In summer, tables go out into the garden at the back, and there are few better places in town to sit with a glass of something cold at six o’clock.

“There are hotels in St Andrews with more history and one with more fame, but none with a better address.”

The detail people remember

The walk to dinner. Out of the door, left along the Scores with the sea beside you, past the Martyrs’ Monument and the bandstand, and along the top of the Bruce Embankment to the first tee, where at seven on a summer evening the last groups are going out into a light that lasts until ten. Then back the way you came for the table you booked. It takes eight minutes and it is the whole point of staying on this street.

Who it is for

Couples, above all: the hotel is built for two people and a bottle. The non-golfing half of a golfing trip, who gets the sea view and the bistro while the other half is out on the Jubilee. Wine people, obviously. Parents visiting a student at the university, which is next door in every direction. And anyone who wants to be in the middle of St Andrews rather than looking at it from the edge.

It is not for large golf groups, who will want the Old Course Hotel’s scale and its walk to the Links, nor for anyone who wants gardens and silence; for that, Rufflets on the edge of town is the answer. And if a wedding is in the house on the Saturday you are here, you will know about it.

A little history

The Scores was laid out in the nineteenth century as St Andrews turned from a decayed cathedral town into a Victorian resort, and the villas along it were built for people who came for the sea air and the golf and stayed for the view. Number 40 spent much of the twentieth century as the St Andrews Golf Hotel, a solid, tweedy place with a loyal following, before Hotel du Vin — a British chain that began in Winchester in the 1990s with the notion of hotels built around wine — bought it, gutted it and reopened it in 2014. The extra bedroom block came later; the 2024–25 refurbishment gave it the calm, coastal palette it has now.

What to do nearby

•     The first tee of the Old Course, two minutes; walk the whole course on a Sunday. Read: St Andrews Links, more than the home of golf.

•     The R&A World Golf Museum, opposite the first tee, for an hour before or after. Read: The R&A World Golf Museum.

•     St Andrews Castle, four minutes along the Scores; the cathedral ten minutes beyond it. Read: St Andrews Cathedral, where the story began.

•     The West Sands, three minutes; go at low tide, early or late.

•     Dinner out, if you are not eating in: Forgan’s on Market Street or the Seafood Ristorante further along the Scores. Read: Forgan’s, St Andrews.

https://www.hotelduvin.com/locations/st-andrews/