Redfern is changing. You might have still been denying the truth when the small bars moved in. Perhaps you refused to see it when the queues started forming outside excellent little cafés like Scout’s Honour and Oratnek. But now that Redfern is home to a cellar door for an Adelaide winery it’s time to face the truth. Redfern is a very different place to the suburb you knew in the early thousand
It’s a tricky issue because we are not fans of the erosion of our city’s working class and bohemian neighbourhoods by skyrocketing property prices, but where creative and dynamic people congregate, everyone else will follow
Which brings us back to the Cake Wines Cellar Door. After a series of popular pop-up bars that doubled as performance spaces, Cake Wines decided to put down some permanent roots in Sydney and have set up a fetching, modern wine bar inside a converted warehouse in the backstreets of Redfern.
It’s a room of brick, timber, concrete and steel, which is both aesthetically pleasing and utterly unforgiving when it comes to noise – on a packed Friday night with DJ-provided beats in the mix you’re closer to a shout than a whisper.
And when we say packed, we mean it. Thursday and Friday nights are free entry from 5pm and on our visit there’s not a free seat in the house. Saturdays there are free DJ sets at 1.30pm for a weekend warm-up, followed by ticketed gigs from 6.30pm, and on Sundays they host hourly wine tastings to get you acquainted with their core range of five Adelaide Hills wines. There’s also two from the McLaren Vale and two pricier drops from their premium Young Wine Maker Series.
But honestly, the $42 bottle of 2014 pinot noir gets the job done. It’s a light bodied number with a dark, fruity spiciness that means when the next one in the round brings back another bottle, no one complains. It’s a wine you can spend a whole evening with.
Or maybe you can’t hack an evening of tannins, in which case the gentle rosé with a sweet berry aroma is for you. It’s not the bone-dry style we’re seeing in bars all across the city of late, but it’s an easy drinking number none the less.
Although it’s touted as a cellar door, glasses start at nine bucks a pop; you can pay $70 a bottle for the really good stuff; and the food is a little pricey. But it’s undeniably an ace spot for banter and booze at the end of the working week. It’s the wine industry's answer to the rise of the brewery bar, and we like what they’re bringing to the table.