Inside the wine program at The Lodge Little Collins, Rodd & Gunn’s new four-level experiential retail store

In the southern wing of the heritage GJ Coles building in central Melbourne, backing on to Mecca’s new three-storey megastore, is an equally ambitious project from New Zealand label Rodd & Gunn. 

The Lodge Little Collins includes a wine store, cocktail lab, casual eatery, fine-dining restaurant, member’s bar and fashion retail store over four storeys. It’s both a nod to the department stores of yore – think the food halls at David Jones or London’s Harrods – and an attempt to make retail more engaging while furthering the brand. 

“It's most definitely experiential, but it's not a casual ‘let's just offer some food and wine’,” says group beverage director Cam Douglas MS. “We’re building on the quality that Rodd & Gunn is known for, while offering an element of surprise and delight.” 

Cam, who is New Zealand’s only Master Sommelier, has been involved with Rodd & Gunn since before the brand launched the Lodge concept in Queenstown in 2015. Since then, he’s also overseen the wine and beverage program at the Rodd & Gunn Lodge in Auckland, which opened in 2019, and Brisbane, which opened in 2022. 

Although hospitality accounts for a small percentage of the brand’s offering on a global level (there are over 200 Rodd & Gunn stores/concessions worldwide, but just four Lodges, plus a fifth underway), three out of four levels of the Melbourne outpost are dedicated to food and drink. 

Below the Rodd & Gunn retail store, which occupies the ground floor, is the enormous, subterranean Cellar & Caffetteria, a combined wine store/bar and casual bistro with an Italian-leaning menu, spread over 500sqm. Level One is home to a dark and moody member’s bar for loyal Rodd & Gunn customers. Above that is a fine-dining degustation restaurant helmed by executive chef James Evangelinos. 

Although the lists have been devised with Melbourne in mind, as in other cities, Kiwi – and Aussie – wines feature heavily across all three spaces. In the Caffetteria, by-the-glass options include Rodd & Gunn’s own wines (made in collaboration with some of New Zealand’s top producers, including Matt Dicey and Tony Bish), and those from a featured guest producer, which is currently Hawke’s Bay superstar Craggy Range. 

There are bottles from Europe and beyond available to order from the list, too, although diners can also choose a bottle from the shelf in the retail section and drink it in-house for $25 corkage, where the options are far wider – although still accessible – as well as cocktails created by Bar Americano’s Matt Bax. 

“We’re not here to collect a library of wines,” says Cam. “We haven't got pages of Burgundy or Bordeaux or anything like that. We want to sell people something that's fresh, young, interesting, and really nice – something that can be drunk on its own and with the food, and is priced to sell.”

It’s a slightly different story upstairs, where the 300-bottle strong list, co-curated by head sommelier Russ Wilcox (ex-Gimlet), features plenty of options from France and wider Europe. However, there’s New Zealand fizz alongside grower Champagne, chardonnay from producers such as Neudorf, Kumeu River, Giant Steps and Cullen with the handful from Chablis, and pinot noir from Felton Road, Burn Cottage, Tolpuddle, and Bass Phillip next to those from Burgundy.  Many of the Kiwi wines on the list aren’t available anywhere else in Australia. 

“Rodd & Gunn has always been a New Zealand story followed very closely by an Australian story, and our wine program reflects that,” says Cam. “We want to make sure at least 50 per cent of our offering is from Australia and New Zealand, although at the moment it’s easily 60 per cent.

“We are so confident with both the wine and the food that we are offering,” Cam adds. “We are taking people on a journey, from the casual retail side of it in the Cellar, to the pure Rodd & Gunn story at street level, up to the member’s cocktail bar, and then this wide, open, happy space on the top level. It’s just the right blend.” 

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