Find your new favourite drop at L.P.O., Tarragindi’s cosy neighbourhood wine store
If you consider yourself a bit of an oenophile, you may have heard the scuttlebutt about a brand-new wine shop generating some buzz over in Tarragindi. That’s L.P.O., a top-notch trove of natural vino owned and operated by hospo pro Dan Wilson and comedian Matt Okine. Here, you can swing through to stock up on a drop or two, or linger over a glass of some extra-special vintages. Take a peek inside …
“How hard is it to open a wine shop?”
If you received this message out of the blue, you might not know how to respond. But when this exact text popped up on Dan Wilson’s phone last year, he knew exactly what to say.
The hospitality veteran has a deep and varied resume. Before returning to Brisbane in 2021, Dan spent most of the previous decade living and working in London, where he’d done a little bit of everything – working as a gun-for-hire chef, cooking for music artists at some of the city’s top recording studios; running popular Hackney wine bar and shop P. Franco; opening three iterations of cafe-restaurant hybrid Dandy. So, when the message appeared – sent by good friend, comedian, actor, radio presenter and Tarragindi local Matt Okine, no less – he knew just how to respond.
“My response was like, ‘With me, it’s pretty easy’,” says Dan. “He messaged me the next day and said, ‘I think the post office is going to be up for lease soon’.”
This where the story of L.P.O., Dan and Matt’s brand-new neighbourhood wine shop, begins. After tracking down the landlord of the site, which is nestled snugly between a hairdresser and a convenience store on Windmill Street, the duo signed on to take over the tenancy before transforming it into a repository of minimal-intervention wines. L.P.O. opened in late March, becoming an incredibly popular destination for locals off the rip.
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Behind its turquoise shopfront, L.P.O. boasts minimally adorned interior, with a simple fit-out making great use of plywood across the store’s shelves and counters. The chicly spartan aesthetic serves to direct attention to the copious amount of wine bottles that double as L.P.O.’s chief decorations. An entire wall is dedicated to showcasing the bulk of L.P.O.’s stock, which Dan has carefully sourced from trusted suppliers and even his own cellar. The aim of the game is to offer something a little bit different to what’s readily available elsewhere, nudging customers outside of their comfort zone and guiding them towards wines they didn’t know they wanted, but will absolutely love.
“P. Franco taught me that it was possible to really engage people with weird, exciting new shit – biodynamic farmers making weird wines,” says Dan. “The idea now is to do something very similar. We have a network of people now who are pushing forward the same kind of thought and appreciation.”
“These wines, in and of themselves, are all attached to strange feelings and different emotions – you find the right wine depending on how you feel and depending on what you want. That’s what we wanted to harbour here. This is a place where people can come in without any pretension, without any expectation or judgment,” he adds.
Dan describes L.P.O.’s wine as broadly natural in focus, with bottles from an array of Australian and international makers on offer.
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“The term that I prefer to use is minimal intervention,” Dan explains. “The starting point for this place – and for the wines that I like to look at – is always treatment of landscape and vine. These makers, they’re accountable to how they’ve treated the land. There’s no pesticides, no crap in the soil and nothing to try and enhance the wine.
“Yes, we have some more conventional stuff that’s made really well in terms of the traditional palate, but we also have things that offset that and play against it. We have things that are tangentially related that might excite you a bit more – wines that are wild in their expression, where the grape becomes less important and the landscape becomes more important.”
L.P.O. in Tarragindi
You’ll spy familiar favourites from local legends Unico Zelo, Minim, Jauma and Defialy, as well as bottles from international labels like Cantina Giardino, Julien Courtois, Le Coste and Gazzetta, with prices per bottle starting as low as $20. While Dan is more than qualified to guide you to the wine you seek, a handy wine merchant’s licence allows L.P.O. to sell samples by the glass, with roughly four whites and four reds open on any given day.
“It was always a really big part of what I wanted the space to be, because not only does it allow people to engage in a different way, it breaks down the fear of being disappointed,” Dan explains. “We work on trust here, because everyone’s palate is different. Having the opportunity to have stuff open means I can work with people to sort of dial in what their palate’s telling them. Then I can direct them to the bottles they’re looking for.”
“I think there’s a different wine for every different way you feel, for every day of the week, for every time of the day, for every month of the year and so on and so forth. As long as you know how you feel and you have someone who understands what the wines can do when you’re drinking them, then your needs can be met.”
On Fridays and Saturdays, L.P.O. will also open a few rarer vintages, available to sample at cost price.
“We’ve got stuff that we can open that doesn’t exist anymore – bottles that are a unicorns in Australia that no one ever gets to taste unless you buy it and sit on it for ten years,” says Dan, who hints that a museum release 2001 pinot gris from Scorpo in Mornington Peninsula might soon feature.
L.P.O.’s immediate adoption by Tarragindi locals speaks to a growing demand in Brisbane for a more considered offering in the suburbs. If his time in London taught him anything, it’s that a successful hospitality business doesn’t need to be high concept – it just needs a real sense of personality and an earnest approach to service.
“The nature of the industry has shifted over the last five or six years more towards experience dining and experience travel,” says Dan. “That doesn’t mean Michelin-stared degustations – it means means character-driven places where there’s an opportunity to walk in and feel a way that isn’t offered anywhere else.”
L.P.O. is now open to the public – operating hours can be found in The Directory.