I went to the best bar in the world a few weeks ago. There was a small queue outside at 10pm but nothing too crazy. It took half an hour or so before I was sitting opposite a few well-dressed bartenders, watching as cocktails were shaken.

The best bar in the world is in Hong Kong, in case you were wondering. It’s called Bar Leone, and it stakes its claim as the globe’s finest thanks to the recent announcement of the World’s 50 Best Bars for 2025, a glittering ceremony in – you guessed it – Hong Kong, in which Bar Leone topped the list.

The bar itself is an ode to the traditional neighbourhood bars of Rome, run by Lorenzo Antinori, himself a transplant from the Eternal City. It’s decked out with black-and-white tiling on the floors, wooden tables and chairs, walls decorated with monochrome photos and AS Roma memorabilia.

Is this really the best bar in the world? It’s a great bar, no doubt. It’s friendly and warm, in the way a great drinking establishment should be. The cocktails are thoughtful and not too crazy, just playful spins on the classics. The crowd is a mix of tourists and locals, those there to see and there to be seen.

But the best bar in the world? No doubt some people would say Bar Leone isn’t even the best bar in Hong Kong. I don’t feel qualified to judge that, though I also called into COA – a cocktail bar inspired by the traditional neighbourhood bars of Mexico City – which is just a few blocks away from Leone, and loved it too.

The venues I love, and no doubt the ones you love too, will almost never appear.

This is the thing with lists: they’re inherently subjective. They’re also unquestionably wrong. There’s no possible way to experience and judge and then quantify and arrange in order every single establishment in the world.

This is a flawed exercise. It’s maybe, even, purely designed to make money.

I say this after watching the announcement last week of yet another 50 Best list: the World’s 50 Best Vineyards, which was presented at yet another glittering ceremony, this time in Margaret River.

You will note the inherent flaw here immediately, because this list isn’t really a judgment of vineyards – the places where grapes are grown – but rather of wineries and their associated visitor experiences. To appear on the World’s 50 Best Vineyards list, it helps to have an architecturally inspiring cellar door and high-end restaurant rather than a deep commitment to, say, regenerative biodynamic viticulture.

Margaret River didn’t get quite the same return on investment that Hong Kong enjoyed. There was only one Australian winery (or vineyard) that made it into the World’s 50 Best, and that was Henschke, in South Australia, at No.47; nothing from Margs even made the extended 51-100 list. There were more wineries from Lebanon than Australia. Ouch.

But this is the thing with global lists like these, the sort that are rapidly expanding into various areas of travel and hospitality, from bars to restaurants to hotels to wineries: the venues I love, and no doubt the ones you love too, will almost never appear.

They just can’t. And if they did, they would be forever altered into something you would probably no longer love.

Let’s take the wineries – or, sigh, vineyards – as an example. Scan the list of the venues that did make it and you will begin to understand why many Australian wineries failed to appear.

We don’t do much big and fancy and flashy here. I’ve written a book on Australian cellar doors, covering every major – and many minor – wine regions in this country, and my favourite venues here have no architectural wow factor; they have no golf course, and rarely even a fancy restaurant.

They’re places that are small, intimate and laid back. You will meet the winemaker at these cellar doors. You can wander through the barrels and tanks between sips. I’m talking Blind Corner in Margaret River, Stefano Lubiana in Tasmania, Polperro in Mornington Peninsula, De Salis in Orange.

Bars are the same. Do you know what, to me at least, is better than an establishment paying homage to the traditional neighbourhood bars of Rome? It’s the traditional neighbourhood bars of Rome. It’s Bar San Calisto in Trastevere, where the crowd is a mix of students and vagrants and the negronis are created by someone upending three bottles simultaneously into a glass.

Bar San Calisto will never appear on a globally recognised list. That is my prediction and my firm hope.

My favourite hotels, too, tend to be small, intimate affairs that will never attract enough attention from international judges to find themselves on big global lists. My favourite restaurants – which I was given the privilege of listing in these pages – are mostly small, low-key joints where the focus is on giving guests a good time, rather than picking up stars and hats and awards.

These lists, therefore, shouldn’t be taken too seriously. They’re a marketing exercise, but they’re also a bit of fun. They can form part of your travel research, but they shouldn’t be the entirety of it.

And every now and then, you can say you’ve been to the best in the world.