Australian restaurants have no respect for Australian wine; and, the condiment to rule them all

It’s rare that I get to spruik a restaurant or bar in my home town. I live on the NSW Central Coast, which does have plenty of great venues – try Que Sera for wine, or Chillis Cottage for brunch by the water – but more specifically I live in Gosford, which does not have plenty of great venues.

My family and I live here because it’s cheap, not because it’s a rich cultural hub. This is why we do the Friday Food Adventures: because in our own neighbourhood there’s not a whole lot to shout about.

Only, what’s this? Dionysia Wine House, a new bar that recently opened on Mann St, close to the new Archibald precinct, across the road from 92 Chilli Basil.

(That makes it sound like a buzzing neighbourhood – the Archibald is pretty fancy; 92 Chilli Basil serves legit Thai food – but I’ve conveniently left out the kebab joint and the leagues club and Love & Lust, which must be about the most frightening adult shop on the planet.)

Dionysia is something of an outlier, for many reasons. It’s a wine bar that exists in Gosford, for starters. But it’s also family owned and operated, by a mother and her two sons, who run the food and wine program between them. It’s a zero-waste kitchen, utilising only produce from the local area, including Wollemi ducks from the Hunter Valley that are bought whole and used in their entirety.  

And the wine on the extensive list at Dionysia is all from NSW. Every drop. From the Hunter, Orange, Mudgee, Tumbarumba, Canberra, the Southern Highlands, Riverina, Hilltops and beyond.

I can’t tell you how refreshing this is to see. And how surprising that it has popped up in Gosford.

This has been a bugbear of mine for years now. So many Australian hospitality venues, particularly in NSW, though around the country in at least some way, don’t support their local wine regions. They don’t lift up local wineries, they don’t make heroes of local winemakers or make an effort to properly feature local wines.

You would never know, from looking at your average wine list in Sydney, that NSW produces almost a quarter of Australia’s wine, second only to South Australia. You wouldn’t get any sense of place from these lists, any idea that this is the style of wine we make around here.

It isn’t like that in Europe. Go to a bar or a restaurant in, say, Spain and have a look at what’s on the list. I’ll use San Sebastian as an example, because I know it so well, but you can reliably extrapolate this to pretty much any place in Europe.

You know what’s on the wine lists in San Sebastian? Wine from Spain. Though more accurately, wine from the Basque Country and neighbouring Rioja. You will occasionally find drops from other Spanish regions, and even some from Pays Basque across the border in France, but for the most part it’s Txakoli and Rioja.

You know what’s on the wine lists in Sydney? I went to a restaurant opening a few months ago, in Paddington, and the wine list featured more wines from Georgia – the country – than it did from NSW. There’s a new restaurant in Terrigal, on the Central Coast, right on the beach, that has 22 wines on sale, and only two are from NSW.

The Hunter Valley, just as a reminder, is less than two hours away.

There are restaurants in Sydney that are proud of their cellars because they feature only Italian wines. Nothing at all from Australia, let alone NSW.

Bennelong restaurant was recently awarded Best Local Wine List for Australasia at the World’s Best Wine Lists Awards, and more than half of the wines offered there aren’t even Australian, let alone properly local. An analysis by Define Wine found that only 6.9 per cent of the wines Bennelong offers are from NSW.

Even public institutions can’t get it right. Bullion Bar & Dining, the restaurant at The Mint in Sydney, run by Museums of History NSW, serves absolutely no NSW wine. The Art Gallery of NSW works with a star local chef at its restaurant Crafted By Matt Moran, but it offers just two NSW wines – both by the same Hunter Valley producer – on its list of 35 labels. (There’s 15 from South Australia.)

You have to remember, too, that this exists in a modern ecosystem where restaurateurs and diners are increasingly interested in provenance, in eating local food, reducing air miles and supporting local growers. There is a good chance you will be told the name of the farmer who grew your asparagus on the farm an hour’s drive away, but your wine will have been flown almost 17,000 kilometres from France.

The way I see it, there are two groups of people responsible for the lack of respect and support given to local wine regions in Australia.

One of those is diners, the people who are buying wine to drink when they’re out at restaurants and bars. Are you looking to drink local, or are you looking for big-ticket French and Italian labels? Or do you not really care that much where it comes from?

If there’s genuine interest in drinking local, as much as there is in eating local, then surely bars and restaurants will be more likely to stock those wines.

The other fault lies with the professional side of hospitality. That includes people like me in the media. It’s also restaurateurs, chefs and sommeliers, who for the most part seem to take little pride in seeking out and serving excellent wine from their home state.

You can see that in their wine lists, but you can also see it in their social media posts, the way wines from the Old World – France, Italy, Spain – are given hero status, held up as the most desirable, the most likely to provoke envy from colleagues.

I almost never see any of the big-name chefs and sommeliers boosting wine from their local regions. And I’m guilty of this too. It’s always cult French stuff, or big-name Burgundy or Chablis, or aged Barolo, or even German Riesling. This is the wine the professionals are proud to drink – not something made in Orange or Mudgee or the Hunter.  

There are exceptions. The Art Syndicate is a wine bar in Surry Hills that serves only NSW wine. Altitude, the restaurant on level 36 of the Shangri-La in Circular Quay, has a really impressive list of Australian wines, with a focus on those from NSW. The Blue Door in Bellingen has a long and thoughtfully chosen selection that leans heavily on NSW producers.

But still, these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

And I mean, I get it. Wine from the Old World has gravitas. It has exclusivity. It’s the stuff that professionals and rich people can get their hands on that other people can’t. It looks good on Instagram.

Wine from other parts of Australia also has that cool factor that NSW tends to lack. Rising-star producers like Joshua Cooper, Owen Latta, Samantha Connew and Matthias Utzinger don’t really have NSW equivalents.

Though, that could easily change. Keep an eye out for anything by Kenisha and Alisdair Tulloch (Aeon Wines, Hunter Valley), Wally Cupitt (Cupitt’s Estate, Shoalhaven), Valentina Moresca (Krinklewood, Hunter Valley), Angus Vinden (Vinden Estate, Hunter Valley), Meagan and James Becker (M&J Becker, Hunter Valley), Ed and Dave Swift (Printhie Wines, Orange), Peta Kotz (Sabi Wabi, Hunter Valley), the Mattick family (Canobolas, Orange), William Rikard-Bell (Rikard Wines, Orange) and many more.

Order their wines if you see them on a list. Take photos of them and put them on social media. And support the bars – like my new favourite in Gosford – that make heroes of locals.

If you have a favourite bar or restaurant that heavily features local wines, please let us know about it in the comments below!

The condiment to rule them all

I’m not writing about a dish this week, but just a single condiment, something you can very easily make at home and keep in your fridge and it will last forever. And, if you’re anything like us, it will become an obsession.

And that condiment is: chillies in vinegar. Jess gets a big bag of bird’s eye chillies, chops them up, tips them in a jar and covers them with coconut vinegar. And that’s it. That’s the condiment.

We use this on just about everything: Thai food, obviously, though also Chinese food and occasionally even Japanese. But it also goes on pasta, and other European dishes that could use a kick. Drizzle just the vinegar if you’re looking for some acid to cut through a fatty dish, or scoop on the chillies if you want fire to go with the sharpness.

And when you start to run out, just chop more chillies, top up with more vinegar, and away you go.

THINGS I’M LOVING THIS WEEK

• Singaporean budget carrier Scoot has a big sale that’s on until Sunday, with fares on select dates from Sydney and Melbourne into the likes of Phuket from $290, Da Nang from $270, and Osaka from $360.
• The UN has voted to adopt a new world map that accurately reflects Africa’s true size. On current Mercator maps, Greenland (2.2 million square kilometres) looks about the same as Africa (30.4 million square kilometres), giving the continent a certain insignificance that isn’t deserved. Nice that it’s been fixed.
• Japan is closing in on a milestone, after 990,950 Australian tourists visited the country in the last financial year. Next year it will surely break 1 million.

THINGS I AM NOT LOVING

• An Australian tourist has died in Bali after trying to take a selfie in a famous clifftop location.
• A French cultural institution, the bistro-café, is in danger of becoming extinct, which is a goddamn tragedy.
• Australia has paused working holiday visas for travellers from 24 countries (out of 29 eligible), which will be a huge hit to regional areas that rely on these visitors for labour, not to mention the money they bring in.