SMART THINKING

In the middle of a global pandemic, it’s perhaps a shame to have lost a promising young doctor to another industry. But few are complaining in Perth, where Sam Winfield’s awardwinning natural wine bar has been voted the country’s best.

A new natural wine bar in Perth has already been voted the country’s best.

A mudbrick house on just over 1,200 hectares in the quiet canola-growing town of Narrogin, 190km south-east of Perth: that’s the humble start of doctor-turned-barkeep Sam Winfield’s story. One that culminated in a Sydney ballroom at the end of August last year when his natural wine bar and store, Wines of While, was named the best in the country by Gourmet Traveller, a mere 12 months after it opened.

Winfield admits he has no romantic story of a childhood passion for food. He can more readily draw a connection between his polarised worlds of hospitality and medicine. “My food awakening was like adding spring onions to mi goreng and being like, ‘Oh, you can add things to this?’” he says, grinning. “I was probably 12.”

Winfield conceived the idea for his bar during the long, hot summer of 2016, whiling away the days in a suburban hospital, scribbling ideas about wine glasses, types of plates and how to fill the “war chest” he would need to open what would later become the country’s best bar.

While natural wine wasn’t necessarily a radical idea for Perth at the time of Wines of While’s opening – Winfield first tried a bottle of Pennyweight Gamay at the popular Print Hall bar and restaurant seven years ago – no other publican had tackled it with Winfield’s uniquely forensic focus.

That devotion saw Winfield open in August 2018 with 200 hand-picked wines on his shelves and a small, wholesome menu of Mediterranean pastas, salamis, crusty sourdough and terrines. None of Wines of While’s staff will ever ask what you normally drink. But it’s not out of a lack of curiosity – in fact, it’s the very opposite. “That question propels a sense of inferiority, of not knowing,” Winfield says. His team’s alternative – “What’s the occasion?” – encourages curiosity. “You can move them through wine in a different way. They don’t feel on the back foot; they might try something new.”

That openness, and a modest mark-up on bottle prices, keeps the store accessible. And his team – just one trained sommelier, two yoga teachers, a lawyer and a barista – were chosen for their relative inexperience: a nod to how daunting the world of wine can be for the uninitiated.

“They’d barely carried plates before,” he says. “The approach is to have a conversation. My idea was that it would be far less intimidating than dealing with a ‘wine person’. With natural wine, you’re not trying to impart your style on it; what you think it should taste like. It’s egalitarian; it’s wine for everyone.”

Winfield is philosophical about the Gourmet Traveller gong.

“I don’t really care about winning, but I care a lot about the fact that it was given to a place like ours,” he says. “Because it tells the rest of Australia that this is okay to do. It says you can open a wine bar with less than $200,000, put wines in it that no one has ever seen before, be super casual, serve two pastas, and that’s fine. It’s amazing, in fact.”

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The Hunter Valley is one of Australia’s most popular wine regions, and with good reason. But why not combine horseback riding with the traditional cellar door experience? mindfood.com/saddle-up