Jon Osbeiston, the wine man

Jon Osbeiston discovered the delights of the grape while a student in the 1970s.

‘We’d sit around listening to Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits late at night, endlessly discussing the meaning of life and drinking red wine,’ Jon Osbeiston says. Picture: Hollie Adams

Jon Osbeiston is back. The hugely respected and influential wine merchant who ran Sydney’s ­Ultimo Wine Centre, one of Australia’s leading retailers for 20 years from the mid-1990s, is now to be found in the wine cellar at the new Bel & Brio food and drink ­emporium in Barangaroo.

I’ve known Osbeiston since the heyday of Ultimo. I’ve judged with him at wine shows and attended wine dinners he has hosted. But I’ve never seen him so relaxed, so voluble and so good-humoured as he is here at Bel & Brio. The phrase “kid in a candy store” springs to mind. Except Osbeiston is no kid. (And he runs the store.)

But he’s bursting with irrepressible enthusiasm for the bottles lining the shelves, eyes twinkling behind slightly wonky glasses, chuffed to be back on the floor after a brief ­hiatus.

“There are some terrific wines coming out of St Joseph and Crozes-Hermitage at the moment,” he says as we peruse the mouth-watering selection of reds from France’s Rhone Valley. And heading into the burgundy section: “I don’t think I’ve seen a better vintage of chablis than the 2014s: such wonderful richness of fruit.”

On it goes: the murmured approval of the experienced merchant, tempting you to reach out and pluck a bottle from the shelf.

No wonder he’s happy. The owners of Bel & Brio (the same team behind the popular Mercato e Cucina, a similar cellar-restaurant-shop concept in Sydney’s Gladesville) brought Osbeiston in with a simple brief: create an old-fashioned, destination wine store and wine bar that grape-geeks like me would swoon over.

Not surprisingly, given his background as a specialist shipper and retailer of wines from Europe — plus the Italian leanings of the Bel & Brio menu — there is a strong emphasis on great Old World bottles here, from the rhones and burgundies already mentioned to barolo, barbaresco and beaujolais. But there’s also a brilliant selection of Australian wines, from the classics (you don’t see older vintages of Wendouree reds on many retailers’ shelves) to the cutting-edge such as Marq winery’s cheeky gamay from Margaret River.

Importantly, Osbeiston also has made sure there are plenty of well-cellared wines with some bottle age available here.

“That’s an advantage of having been in the game for so long,” he says. “I’ve sold a lot of wine to a lot of people over the years who now have more than they can drink in two lifetimes, so I’ve been able to buy some of it back, knowing exactly how it’s been stored since I sold it to them in the first place. Thank god for collectors.”

Osbeiston discovered wine while studying arts and law at the Australian National University in the late 1970s.

“We’d sit around listening to Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits late at night, endlessly discussing the meaning of life and drinking red wine,” he says. “And then there was a moment, with a bottle of Lindemans Cawarra Claret of all things, that I remember thinking, ‘Hold on, this is a bit better than the rest.’ ” Soon he and his mates — including fellow student Grant van Every, who would go on to become a prominent sommelier and wine consultant — were holding tastings and frequenting Canberra’s BYO restaurants, clutching top-scoring bottles that had featured in that month’s Wine & Spirits Buying Guide.

“It was a self-education,” Osbeiston says. “Pretty much the only education I was getting, really. Uni lectures were always in the morning. I’m not a morning person.” Osbeiston says he and van Every blame each other for their respective downfalls. During a stint running the ANU college bar they promoted a new band, Flowers, later to become Icehouse, on its first gig outside Sydney (“We had to resign after that because it was such a loss-making exercise”), and in 1983 they embarked on an indulgent tour of France’s wine regions and three-star restaurants.

“You could afford to do that because the dollar was so strong,” he says. “Le Cafe Nouveau was Sydney’s smartest French restaurant back then and the set menu was $75. The set menu at the top three-star French places — Alain Chapel, Michel Guerard — was $50. And Bordeaux vintages from the 1960s were $50 a bottle on the list. Not any more.”

By the time he returned to Sydney he was hooked, and started working in bottle shops, eventually becoming a partner in Oddbins Wine Merchants and then, in the mid-90s, opening the Ultimo Wine Centre and becoming an importer of quality bottles, particularly from France and Italy.

Osbeiston eventually sold ­Ultimo to the Coles supermarket-owned Vintage Cellars chain in 2013, then helped the Melbourne-based Prince Wine Store set up a Sydney outpost in Alexandria before having a three-month holiday (“The first I’d had in 30 years,” he says, “and I did absolutely nothing; it was glorious”) and starting at Bel & Brio.

Many in the wine trade cite ­Osbeiston as a mentor — particularly for introducing them to imported wine — and the list of Ultimo alumni includes leading importers James Johnston (of World Wine Estates) and Andrew Guard, Barossa-based winemaker Alex Head, Moppity Vineyards marketer Renee Foster and New York-based sommelier Jason Hoy.

Because of this background, in a recent article I described the 59-year-old Osbeiston as a “veteran wine merchant” — a fair description, I thought, given his experience and influence.

“Yes, I saw that,” he says, looking momentarily stern. “But I have to tell you the same week I became a grandfather for the first time — and a young person stood up and gave me a seat on the light rail. I had the trifecta. I took the seat, by the way; I was feeling a bit tired …”

Being a veteran, of course, means you have perspective.

“In restaurants and wine retail these days everybody’s looking for the latest thing,” he says. “It’s easy to overlook the long-term people who’ve been doing great work for a years. People like Joe Grilli from Primo Estate (in McLaren Vale). I first started stocking Joe’s wines ages ago, but what he’s making now has never been better. We’ve put his pinot grigio on in the wine bar and it’s selling like hot cakes. I respect what he’s doing. It’s a tough job for people to keep themselves fresh as a brand in an industry that’s all about the new.”

Max Allen visited Sydney and Barangaroo with the assistance of Destination NSW.