ABOUT SEPTIMUS
Cheese and wine in Adelaide’s East End, inside the old market buildings
Adelaide in 1904 was a city in a hurry to be taken seriously. It had outgrown the arrangements of its first fifty years and was busy replacing them with grander ones, in stone, with inscriptions carved above the doors. Two things happened that year that have nothing obvious to do with each other, and both of them ended up in this room.
On 24 April the governor laid a foundation stone at 220 Grenfell Street. Eight days later, on 2 May, the Adelaide Fruit and Produce Exchange opened for trade. In the same city in the same year, a young painter who had arrived from Melbourne four years earlier became the first Australian artist the trustees of the National Art Gallery of South Australia had ever commissioned. They paid him one hundred guineas to paint an animal picture. His name was Harold Septimus Power.
THE NAME
Power was born in Dunedin in 1877, the seventh of eight children, which is how a boy comes to be given a Latin ordinal for a middle name. His father, an Irish-born hatter, wanted him in veterinary surgery. At fourteen he left home to paint instead, and took the sort of work that put him near animals: assisting a vet, and painting the heads of beasts on the sides of butchers’ delivery vans, which is an unglamorous apprenticeship for a man who would end up hanging in the Australian War Memorial.
He came to Adelaide around 1900 and worked as an illustrator and political cartoonist for the Observer, the Register and the Critic, drawing politicians for a living and painting in the Adelaide Hills alongside Hans Heysen for love. The gallery commission came in 1904, the resulting picture titled After the Day’s Toil. He married Isabel Butterworth that September and left for Europe, to the Académie Julian in Paris and then years at the Royal Academy in London.
In 1917 he became one of Australia’s first two official war artists. His sweeping scenes of horses and artillery on the Western Front hang today in Canberra. The horse was his lifelong subject, and it is the reason we borrowed his middle name, along with a little of his eye for movement and craft. We hang original artwork on these walls and treat what we pour and plate the same way we treat what we hang.
THE BUILDING
Growers from the Adelaide Hills and the plains had gathered to sell along East Terrace since the 1860s, when Richard Vaughan established the original East End Market near the Stag Hotel. By 1900 the trade had outgrown its site and was spilling into the streets. William Charlick, of the merchants Charlick Bros, acquired land between Grenfell and Rundle Streets and, when talks to merge with the existing market failed, simply built his own.
Designed by the South Australian architect Henry J. Cowell, the Exchange wore its purpose with pride: ornate gabled canopies, cornucopia motifs spilling fruit, and, carved above the Grenfell Street entrance, the inscription The Earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof. At its opening it was among the most advanced market facilities in the country. It traded here for some eighty years.
By the 1980s it had outgrown its streets in turn, and in 1988 the Exchange moved to Pooraka. The redevelopment kept the Cowell facades along Grenfell Street, East Terrace, Rundle Street and Union Street, while the halls behind made way for apartments, shops and offices. The 1904 shopfront you walk through was hand-painted and gold-foiled by the traditional signwriters at MoonDog. Upstairs, the cabinetry was custom made to fit a room that was never designed to hold it.
A WINE BAR ON GRENFELL STREET
Here is the part that ought to be a coincidence and is not. Twenty-eight years before the foundation stone went down, in December 1876, Thomas Hardy opened a wine bar on Grenfell Street. It was the first in Adelaide and among the earliest recorded anywhere in Australia. The Evening Journal announced it as Something new.
Hardy’s purpose was not hospitality for its own sake. Colonial wine in the 1870s carried a stubborn prejudice against it, and the drinking public assumed that anything worth opening had come off a ship. So he sold the good ordinary wines of the country at moderate prices, by the glass, to people who would never have bought a case of them, and let the wine make its own argument. By the time he died in 1912 he was being eulogised as the father of the South Australian wine industry.
That was a hundred and fifty years ago, on this street, and the argument has moved on only in its particulars. Ours is that a South Australian shiraz and a French syrah are more interesting side by side than either is alone, and that most people are nearly as nervous choosing a wine as they are speaking in public. Both problems are solved the same way, which is by pouring something and talking about it.
WHAT WE DO NOW
Two storeys, fifty seats, Tasmanian oak and green marble, French curtains hanging alongside the building’s original stained glass. A cellar built around varietal, region and producer, spanning Champagne and Burgundy and the Rhône, the Barossa and Clare and McLaren Vale and the Coonawarra, with back vintages and small allocations for anyone curious enough to go looking. Cheese from Europe’s affineurs and South Australia’s best, charcuterie sliced to order, both rotating with what is good rather than what is convenient.
We run winemaker masterclasses, Cellar Door Sundays and a monthly blind tasting championship, because a bar that only sells wine is a shop with chairs. Star Wine List, the international guide to the world’s great wine bars and restaurants, has awarded Septimus a White Star.
Come on a cold night and curl up around a glass of something red. That was always the idea.
Winemakers, importers and distributors: see trade and producers.