Jimmy’s, where wine flowed, offering the promise of the big city

Men in beards and jackets with leather patches at the elbows sat about reading broadsheet newspapers. A few puffed on pipes.Young women and some not so young wandered about speaking loudly and confidently smoking cigarettes, the air tinged with smoke and morning sunlight slanting through windows.Carlton institution Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar.Artwork: Matt DavidsonCrusty bread and bowls of olives sat upon wooden tables.The place was crowded. Conversation flowed between groups standing beneath a high void and into a courtyard where greenery hung over shoulders.Everyone, it seemed, knew everyone. Except me.I was an interloper, transfixed. It was the most impossibly sophisticated place I had experienced. Not that I had any experience at all in such environments.I was from the country. And yet, I sensed no one cared.Everyone without a cup of coffee in hand was drinking wine. At 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning.I had come 4½ hours from my home in the country to visit a cousin who attended Melbourne University.She led me down Carlton’s sunlit streets in the early morning, wonderful scents – unfamiliar cooking and coffee that clearly wasn’t Nescafe Blend 43 – greeting our every step, and on to the Queen Victoria Market.Lygon Street, Carlton, where the scent of coffee and what seemed exotic food captured the author.The AgeWe filled string bags with fruit and vegetables and cheese.I was transported; the cry of Italian vendors and the jostling of crowds. This, I thought, must be what it is like to travel in Europe.And then, said my cousin, we are going to Jimmy Watson’s.Which is where I stood dumbstruck between the courtyard and a room filled with tables and their lounging occupants, craving with quiet desperation to belong and knowing I did not, for I was a bumpkin.Wine!Inside Jimmy Watson’s.Jo GamvrosIt sloshed into glasses, sat in bottles and curvaceous containers I would come to know were carafes and touched every lip in the house. Claret and hock, I guessed, which was about the extent of my knowledge of the stuff.Who drank wine, apart from our mothers and aunts in their search of merry laughter through something called Barossa Pearl? And who drank at 11am, other than those we disparaged as winos?It was late springtime, 1970.This, then, became my introduction to what I saw as the unbearable lightness of life in the city. A promised land.Professors mingled with students and journalists gathered with bohemians, and the lofty knowing air of the colleges and stone walls of the University of Melbourne hung unseen over all.Walking along Lygon Street, Carlton, in the 1980s.Fairfax MediaThese were people, I thought, who would be at ease attending an art exhibition or a classical concert or a footy match at the MCG, all the while having a say in how society might evolve. People who thought nothing of wandering down a street crowded with Italian cafes to lounge and socialise and read the papers in an establishment that served wine on a Saturday morning. City people.Jimmy Watson’s. Melbourne’s first wine bar.It faced the street plain and wide and whitewashed as if transported from an Aegean island. An enterprising wine merchant named Jimmy Watson bought three separate houses in Lygon Street in 1935 and set about introducing Australian beer drinkers to wine.Jimmy Watson’s in Lygon Street.Mario BorgSoon enough, he organised trips to Rutherglen in north-east Victoria where he bought under-appreciated Australian wine in barrels called hogsheads, which he decanted into bottles with his own label.In the early 1960s, when Melbourne’s straitlaced drinking laws were rejigged a bit to require a restaurant and kitchen to be added if wine were to be sold to the table, Jimmy Watson’s was transformed into the place that captivated me in 1970.With great good fortune, the modernist architect Robin Boyd, who had recently published his influential book The Australian Ugliness (1960) and who was an unrelenting critic of Australians’ addiction to adding what he considered vulgar decorative features to their buildings (“featurism”, he called it), got the job of redesigning Jimmy Watson’s.Robin Boyd redesigned Jimmy Watson’s.Happily, the deceptively simple Mediterranean-influenced place still graces Lygon Street in Carlton. It still serves good food and excellent wine and remains in the hands of the Watson family, though Jimmy himself died in 1962, the year before Boyd’s timeless renovation was complete.On the infrequent occasions I wander past or slip in for a glass these days, the sensation, the very mood that captured me on that spring morning in 1970 slips over me, though, like the first time you see snow or a tropical island, it might never be properly recreated.The Melbourne I slowly got to know long ago remains in many ways a city to excite the heart, though its pace of life and its mood have changed to the extent that much of it has become almost unrecognisable. That’s hardly surprising.The city’s population has doubled since 1970. Its towers have soared, its street canyons have deepened, its suburbs have sprawled so far that villages that were once way out in the country have been subsumed by houses that are all but unaffordable for ordinary people.We are reminded this week of something darker: that the growth of the vast infrastructure necessary for such a city’s future has been so utterly captured by standover merchants and organised crime that a premier has been brought down.University life, too, is distant from the communal rite of passage that existed when intellectual and cultural engagement spilled across places like Jimmy’s.These days campus is reportedly often a lonely world, many students visiting only for a tutorial if necessary and then leaving – a grind towards a qualification to get a job that, in a world of artificial intelligence, is suddenly uncertain.Jimmy Watson’s is still in the hands of the family. Nigel Watson is the late Jimmy’s grandson.Simon SchluterAnd yet, though Carlton’s Little Italy was once exotic, today there are so many marvellous eating and gathering places around Melbourne representing so many ethnicities that you very nearly need an international dictionary of cuisine to read The Age’s splendid Good Food section.That a place like Jimmy Watson’s has lived on through all the vast changes seems to me a sort of miracle.It’s an anchor to a time when the big city felt to this country boy to be a promised land, and a reminder that with a little imagination, it still can be.Get the day’s breaking news, entertainment ideas and a long read to enjoy. Sign up to receive our Evening Edition newsletter.Tony Wright is an associate editor and special writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.From our partners