The quintessential drink-and-dine-in wine shop, the City Wine Shop was integral to shaping Melbourne’s wine-loving reputation, and it continues to be just as relevant today. You can eat and drink very well here, or pick at some simple plates and have a glass or two, or simply have a beer at the outdoor tables in this most European corner of Melbourne.
If you’re taking a bottle home, just next door is the sibling Spring Street Grocer, where you can pick up stunning cheese and premium grocery items, along with gelato to go.
Oddly, with a few notable exceptions, it took a surprisingly long time for this successful model to catch on more broadly, but catch on it did. The City Wine Shop, though, remains the reference point, the platonic ideal of Melbourne’s casual wine revolution. Indeed, it’s hard to overestimate the importance of the City Wine Shop, with alumni fanning out into making, selling, importing, writing about and judging wine in a variety of interesting and influential ways.
The wine offer runs to some 1,200 lines, with many on display on the wine wall and in the fridges, though some with heftier price tags slumber in the sliver of cellar that runs adjacent to the vast, sunken communal table that runs the length of the back room. The by-the-glass selection tops out at about 25, with featured bottles set into one of the recessed shelves in the olive-green tiled back bar. Changes are made to both lists in a ever-evolving way, typically daily.
Today, the City Wine Shop would be entirely familiar to anyone who walked through the doors 17 years ago and not since. Everything remains in its place, friendly black-clad staff, hand-chalked specials, and even classic menu items like the schnitzel and tuna niçoise remain unchanged, but not out of habit, simply because they have endured well, just like the timeless interior.
Just as Con Christopoulos was almost single-handedly responsible for reclaiming the Paris end of Melbourne’s city from what looked like terminal decline some decades ago, he too is redrawing the borders west of Elizabeth Street. In territory mired in restaurant touts, with menus pitched mainly to a tourist audience, and otherwise populated by city workers…
From his original base at Toorak Cellars, Lyndon Kubis, along with business partners Renton Carlyle and Mark Hopkinson, have expanded into territory less well serviced, including Milton in Malvern and the notoriously dry zone of Surrey Hills (not to be confused with Sydney’s Surry hills, which is afforded much better amenity) in Melbourne’s east, with…
Mark Nelson has thrown out any notion of convention in his very personal wine bar, serving lo-fi wine and snacks, and every now and then veering into a full-on party vibe with disco ball, thumping music and rollicking good times – but it’s just as welcoming and even calm most of the time.
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