Love Tilly Devine

In 2010, the cramped store room of long-standing wine retailer Best Cellars was lovingly refurbished into a hole-in-the-wall wine bar by ex-fine dining Sommelier Matt Swieboda. The laneway space is small – just 40 patrons, and that’s a squeeze – and unpretentious, with a short, well-executed list of bar snacks to support the superb wine offering.

In a city long hostile to wine bar culture, the comment “it’s like a bar you’d find in Melbourne” was considered high praise. Perhaps as a snub to those inevitable comparisons, Love Tilly was named for famous Sydney folk figure, the notorious crime boss Mathilda Devine. Appropriately, this wine bar helped Sydney to find its feet, and ten years on​ is part of the very fabric of the city’s wine scene.

Born out of the revolution around natural, minimal intervention wines, this list focuses on the new wave Australian producers operating within the movement, with international producers thrown in to benchmark.

Varieties and regions are explained in a no-nonsense, tongue in cheek manner, with special love given to Riesling. ’Riesling is the best drink in this bar. Riesling is the best drink in any bar’ are just two from a long list of statements about the ’much-maligned’​ grape. Whilst written with a sense of humour, this spiel offers some insight into the passionate and uncompromising nature of the author.

Love Tilly’s list is very much a ‘who’s who’ in the cult of natural wines, and a fair reflection of the most sought after producers in the genre the world over.