Billy Kwong clinches Hottest Wine Program award with bespoke booze

Restaurants don’t just order wine in bulk — some, like Billy Kwong, are blending and bottling their own bespoke booze.

Extra effort: Billy Kwong sommelier Nicola Calvert. Picture: Steve Baccon

If you were to dream up a wine list that embraced the hottest trends in Australian restaurant drinking in 2015, it would look a lot like Billy Kwong’s.

The seemingly unquenchable thirst among Australian sommeliers for wines from the organic/biodynamic/natural/orange camp — “hipster-bait wines”, let’s call them — just keeps building on lists across the country. Even the most conservative restaurants serving the most conventional food now feel it necessary to offer at least a couple of wild-yeast fermented, unfiltered, cloudy wines by the glass and/or the bottle. And most restaurants laying any claim to hotness have their lists liberally sprinkled with natural booze.

At Billy Kwong, winner of our Hottest Wine Program award this year, many of the wines fall into this category, although they’re not all wild and woolly. There are also plenty of familiar wines on offer, from grower champagne to Margaret River sem sav, from Central Otago pinot to Hunter Valley shiraz. Chef Kylie Kwong has discovered how well these wines complement her menu.

The list begins with this mantra: “Everything has been chosen with the flavours, textures and nuances of Kylie’s food in mind.” It’s a philosophy that comes vividly to life when you sip on a glass of skins-fermented, unfiltered white wine — a lick of volatile acidity, a chalky grip on the tongue — and then take a salty, tangy, umami-rich bite of stir-fried native greens with ginger and shoyu: these things were clearly made to come together in your mouth.

But it’s not just the wine that’s spot on here. The list is very much on-trend by making a big feature of other drinks such as Japanese sake, craft spirits, craft beers and craft ciders — including an outstanding collection of über-hip sour beers, a style of alcoholic beverage that is perfect for the flavours, textures and nuances of the food.

More restaurants are moving away from varietal grouping (listing all the rieslings, followed by the chardonnays, followed by the pinots and so on) to arranging wines by style. This is a very good thing, as it helps the diner match a wine with what they’re eating — and feeling — and it’s done particularly well at Billy Kwong. So you have a collection of riesling, sauvignon and pinot gris whites grouped together under the heading “steely and austere wines, lightweight, good for an aperitif and a friend of spice”, a clutch of reds made from grapes both famous (cabernet franc) and obscure (grignolino) described as “bright young things — pretty, fresh and floral”, and so on.

The clincher, though, is the range of exclusive bespoke wines, beers and spirits — “Project Drinks” — made as a collaboration between some of Australia’s top artisan producers and the restaurant: one-off bottlings from winemakers such as Jauma, Mac Forbes and Shobbrook; small-batch beers from local breweries Young Henry’s and Nomad; a gin distilled for Billy Kwong by Bill Lark in Tasmania using a unique blend of botanicals.

Beverage manager Nicola Calvert could compile her wine list by sitting in the office and phoning in her orders to wholesale distributors. Instead she travels to Hobart, to the Adelaide Hills, to Newtown to help blend and bottle these exclusives. But the hard work is worth it: diners have embraced the bespoke booze with gusto, and the exclusive drinks are now the most popular items on the list.

All this extra effort is what makes Billy Kwong our pick for Hottest Wine Program rather than Hottest Wine List: we were impressed by the philosophy, the execution and the service of the whole wine experience, not just by the catalogue of bottles on the page (see my column in today’s Weekend Australian Life section for more discussion of this distinction).

Another major wine trend in restaurants this year is the small list of just two dozen or so offerings. A lot of new places have concluded you don’t need to stock thousands of bottles to satisfy your customers’ drinking desires. Africola in Adelaide, for example, and Nel in Sydney both have very small (30 or so wines) but dynamic lists that are entirely appropriate for the ethos of the restaurant and don’t leave you wishing you had more choice.

The other trend is the rise of the outstanding winery restaurant list. Not very long ago, most winery restaurants simply offered their own booze, with a few back vintages thrown in for “depth”. Now, more restaurants in wineries are taking a welcome global approach and listing bottles from other producers near and far — and it’s paying off. The lists found at places such as Muse at Hungerford Hill in the Barossa, The Source at Moorilla/MONA in Hobart, and Fino at Seppeltsfield in the Barossa are not only great winery restaurant lists — they’re some of the best in Australia.