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Sommelier of the Year, The Judy Hirst Award: Lincoln Riley, Taxi Dining Room

It’s akin to writing the great Australian novel. You’ve got 40 pages of blank space in front of you and 1000 wines that have to be whipped into shape and brought vividly to life on the page.

Sommeliers have to attract readers from the very beginning and then keep their attention to the end. It’s an art, and one at which Lincoln Riley, head sommelier at Taxi Dining Room in Melbourne, excels.

He is the inaugural winner of the Judy Hirst Sommelier of the Year Award, named in honour of the late Judy Hirst who with her husband, Rob, started the (then) Tucker Seabrook Australian Wine List of the Year Awards in 1994.

Riley has worked at Taxi for three years, and before that at Federation Square’s Lower and Upper House wine rooms (now under new ownership and new names) and Wine Bank on View in Bendigo. He has also worked with wine in Britain.

His philosophy is simple and practical: “A wine list needs to be welcoming and accepting because, let’s face it, it can all be a little bit daunting for the average punter. Not everyone has an interest in wine.”

However, if the average punter does have an interest in wine, Taxi Dining Room in Melbourne is the place to go. Riley’s list has been called fantastic, imaginative and unpretentious by this year’s judges in the Fine Wine Partners/Gourmet Traveller WINE Australia’s Wine List of the Year Awards. They were impressed by the young man’s selection of a broad range of classic and new-age wines from Australia and around the world.

And the judges would no doubt be delighted to hear that Riley changes his list weekly, with between 40 and 50 wines moving in and out of the selection, a process that necessitates the reprinting of at least 10 pages of the 40-page list.

For winter, he moved from crisp rosés and sauvignon blancs to warmer reds. And he’s not afraid to have his list a bit top-heavy with wines that suit the kitchen’s innovative twist on Japanese and modern Australian food ideas.

“We have a huge emphasis on aromatic grape varieties, more so than other lists, because they work so well with [chef Michael Lambie’s] food,” he says. The grapes he is referring to include riesling, gewürztraminer and pinot gris.

“You need to take into consideration the same things as you do when you are constructing a food menu, such as seasons and things. The list is ever evolving and changing over the year,” he says.

Riley and his troupe of sommeliers have a simple three-tier approach to serving their Taxi customers.

“You don’t want to take too much time out of someone’s dining experience,” he says, “so we might offer three different varietals to people – say, a riesling from Tassie, one from Clare and an imported riesling from Alsace or Austria.

“If they decide that Clare is their thing, we then offer them a Clare riesling at three different price points. It gives people options. They feel comfortable and they don’t feel they’re being railroaded.  “We’ve all been in the situation where you’ve asked for some advice only to be offered one of the most expensive wines on the list.”

Riley epitomises the new professional Australian sommelier, one who is creative, adventurous, down to earth and doesn’t mind breaking the odd rule or having a bit of fun with wine.

We raise our glasses to him.

TEXT JENI PORT

This article appeared in the August/September 2008 issue of Gourmet Traveller WINE.