Best-of list · Wine Bars
The 10 best wine bars in Melbourne for 2026 — Fitzroy natural rooms, CBD basements, Carlton wine-shop-bars and South Yarra French bistros, ranked.
The short answer
10 ranked rooms follow. How we picked is at the end of this guide.
Melbourne has been Australia's wine capital for at least two decades, but in 2026 the argument has taken a generational turn — the city's wine bar scene is no longer organised around the Margaret River-and-Barossa axis that defined the 2000s, but around small-producer Yarra Valley, Macedon and Mornington Peninsula bottlings that the local sommelier community has spent the last ten years importing into the bars themselves. The natural-wine movement that arrived via Bar Liberty in 2016 has matured into a settled drinking culture, and Melbourne now exports its sommelier talent to London and Hong Kong rather than the other way round.
This ranking is built from a year of return visits across Fitzroy, Carlton, the CBD, South Yarra and Carlton North. We weighted by-the-glass programme depth and Australian-producer integration at thirty-five percent, room and service at twenty-five, value at twenty, and editorial conviction at twenty. Bars relying primarily on big-name New Zealand and French imports without engaging Victorian producers were marked down; bars working hard on Mornington pinot, Heathcote shiraz and Pyrenees riesling rose. The bars below are where Melbourne's sommelier community actually drinks on their nights off.
Beyond the 10
Andrew McConnell's Gertrude Street wine bar in Fitzroy, open since 2015 and inducted into Broadsheet's ten-year club. The list ranks among the neighbourhood's deepest, with a daily small-plates menu from his Meatsmith butcher.