Bahama Gold Sells Quality Wines for $10 – How?

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Back at uni, my housemates and I would regularly tram up to Fitzroy North to go to Neighbourhood Wine. We’d play at being adults, fill up on bread and consume indecent amounts of the ludicrously affordable house wines.

In 2019 the same people opened Old Palm Liquor. And soon after, during the pandemic, they evolved the vacant space next door into a takeaway bottle shop, then a full fledged bar: Bahama Gold.

We once called it “ one of the best, and least talked about, drinking spots in Melbourne ”, but you’d never say that now. The venue and its front footpath are perennially packed. Apart from the vibes, most people are there for the $10 glasses of house wine. And it’s great wine – wine that’d easily go for $15 or more elsewhere in Melbourne.

How the heck do they do it?

“In 2015, originally at Neighbourhood Wine, an importer started bringing in some kegs of prosecco, so we put them on tap,” says Gus Gluck, Neighbourhood Group’s beverage manager. “Then we started importing these systems called Key Kegs , which allowed us to go to small wine producers and fill up kegs – so we could have wines on tap that were basically house wines, but from amazing artisanal producers.

“With wine, one of the biggest costs is logistics – bottles, labels, caps, having to go on the road and sell maybe only six or 12 bottles. Instead, we can be like ‘We’ll take 1000 litres’, which is like 1400 bottles at once, and it’s a much better price for us, it’s much easier for them, and everyone wins.”

Annually, the three venues sell about 22,000 litres of house wines between them. As the vintage comes ready each year – right about now – the huge volume is palletised and loaded onto trucks that race to Melbourne overnight. They arrive at a warehouse that’s partly leased by the Neighbourhood Group, where team members take turns on the forklifts to unload the trucks. The wines are deposited into custom-built temperature-controlled cauldrons, which the three venues continually draw on throughout the year.

“This is not the easy way to do things – it’s a lot easier just to buy stuff directly from a wholesaler,” Gluck says. “But by taking it all at once, or at least some at one moment and some at another, we’re making sure that these winemakers get paid.

“It’s not a big secret, but no one can be bothered to do it the way we do – because we’ve been doing it for such a long time.”

In the beginning Bahama Gold had three $9 wines on tap:a cab franc and cinsault blend from the Barossa’s Tom Shobbrook, plus a riesling and a 10-grape red blend from Koerner. Koerner still makes the Bahama Gold’s best-selling Bright Red blend, as well as the Rizza, a Clare Valley Riesling. In the last few years it’s been joined by makers like Patrick Underwood at Little Reddie, near Bendigo, who contributes a Pinot Gris and a recently launched dark rose.

The sheer economies of scale also allow the Neighbourhood Group to give feedback and fine-tune the taste of each vintage. It’s how the Bright Red, a blend whose exact makeup changes every season, pretty much tastes the same, year-in, year-out.

And despite how involved the process is, it’s tough to argue with the results. When we asked back in April , Gluck told us that they sold 1300 glasses of the Bright Red alone across the month.
It’s a tiny glimmer of affordability in the cost-of-living canyon we all live in now, and Neighbourhood Group is committed to keeping it going.

“The cost of everything is going up, but we really want to maintain having $10 glasses of wine, because we want to appeal to everyone – the youngest and the oldest people, and now increasingly more middle-aged people whose mortgages are going up,” Gluck says.

“We just want people to keep on drinking wine – it’s our little mission.”

Additional reporting by Dan Cunningham

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