LOC Bottle Bar – Introduction

LOC Bottle Bar in Adelaide is a wine bar, wine shop and cafe that is one of the most welcoming venues for hospitality staff and those seeking interesting natural wines and perfectly cooked food. It is only tiny with three small tables inside, but on sunny days there is plenty of outside seating.

Before we go any further we should add that we have been selling our natural wines to this venue since it opened. Those who have been following this site and our Instagram entries will know that we don’t do classical reviews where judgements both positive and negative are passed from on high.

We are merely telling stories about places we like to visit, because we get asked by so many people where they should eat and drink when they are travelling.

The owner of LOC, Olivia Moore, greets everyone with a smile and sets the scene for an enjoyable experience. She is also very knowledgeable about the wines she sells and can recommend something for you depending on your preferences.

The cooking is done at a fourth table inside with help from some induction plates. When we were visiting Adelaide, we were lucky that talented Tom Campbell, previously the chef at the Summertown Aristologist, was working at LOC and producing some amazing food such as a plate of crudités with a miso dip, raw fish with kefir and risotto Milanese with bone marrow – an exciting dish! As was a “hamburger” of tripe that we were served on our second visit in two days. We ordered the raw fish with kefir on each of our three visits in three days!

So here are some of the dishes:

Notice that the menu is dated as it changes regularly with availability of produce.

Above is the dish of crudités with some dips – a most enjoyable start to our meal – good strong organic vegetables packed with flavour.

The raw fish dish that we ordered each night we were there!

The risotto with marrow bone – it was great to see this crowd pleaser being afforded due reverence by the customers.

Although our photo does not capture the dish as well as we would have liked, the flavour and texture was stunning, so much so that we also ordered this each night.

It very much reminds us of other eating and drinking places that we love (or have loved) to visit such as Public Wine Bar and Bar Liberty in Melbourne, Lucinda in Hobart, Aux Deux Amis in Paris, P Franco in London, Le Cercle Rouge in Angers, Bistrot des Claquets in Arbois, Winestand Waltz in Tokyo, Wines of While in Perth and 10 William St in Sydney just to name a few.

The wine is on display on the rear wall of the small space and favour those which are natural with a number of South Australian natural producers being featured.

For those of you who are confused about why so many restaurants and wine bars throughout the world are featuring natural wines, the reasons are quite clear.

There is little argument about the fact that clean food is preferable to food that has been sprayed with systemic sprays that infiltrate the food and cannot be “washed off”. These sprays are lethal for your precious gut bacteria that control so much about your health.

As restaurants turn to organic produce they also start to question the use of systemic sprays in vineyards that are used to control weeds and bugs and moulds, mildew and black rot to name just a few.

So it seems strange to serve clean food and then serve wine made from grapes that have ingested sprays used in the vineyard. And this is why so many are turning to natural wine which must be organic or biodynamic and have used no additives except, perhaps, small amount of sulphites as preservatives.

Olivia puts it nicely on the LOC website:

We buy wine from thoughtful producers, who put care and consideration into the juice they bottle, either growing grapes organically or purchasing fruit from others who do, allowing the fruit to speak for itself. For us that also means adding nothing else to the wine, aside from a little sulphur, sometimes.

Heck, it’s just about drinking good booze from good people, right?

We are looking forward to our next visit to Adelaide, and no doubt, we will head straight to LOC on arrival!

If you want to know more about Adelaide (and LOC), we have written a story about our recent visit that covers the places we visited here.