Meet the water sommeliers: they believe H₂O can rival wine – but would you pay £19 a bottle?

‘I’ve been trying to get restaurants to do this for years’ … Doran Binder, the water sommelier at La Popote in Cheshire and the founder of Crag spring water. Photograph: Shaw and Shaw/The Guardian

For diners at a fancy restaurant in Cheshire, there is now a new twist to the usual routine. First comes La Popote’s menu, created by the owners, the chef Joe Rawlins and Gaëlle Radigon, who live upstairs with their children. Next comes the wine list, which includes more than 100 bottles. And then, in what is very much a first for Cheshire, a water list.

Rawlins, 32, presents the new menu as I get comfy in the dining room in a converted redbrick barn in Marton, a village halfway between Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent. A choice of seven waters ranges from a £5 bottle of Crag, which comes from the nearby Peak District, to Vidago, a mineral-rich water from a Portuguese spa town, which will cost you £19.