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  • Melbourne's best new bars in the CBD.
  • Find $10 glasses of vino.

Melbourne now has excellent new bars to enjoy fine wines, even a glass for $10. You can also take a rooftop spot where you can enjoy your favourite cocktails and have fun at the same time with soothing music, or have a martini and lobster mac and cheese from an acclaimed restaurateur.

1. Denton Wine Bar

Location: 1 Flinders Ln, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

Phone: +61 3 9639 9500

The new bar serves Denton wine on the site that previously housed Kappo, Nama Nama and Verge bar. Quality cured meats and cheeses complement a simple and seasonal menu of six dishes created by Kieran Hoop. Enjoy a $10 vino, four spirits and just six beautifully restrained dishes on the menu. At Simon Denton’s also upstairs Japanese-influenced bar Hihou and nearby basement eatery Izakaya Den's intimate new Flinders Lane spot, you have everything you need – and nothing more.

The wooden bar is the best place to perch at this Euro-leaning wine spot, where you can look out onto Fitzroy Gardens. There, you can snack on Wagyu bresaola and truffle salami and work your way through the carefully selected drops scrawled onto the blackboard while chatting with Denton, who owns a vineyard in the Yarra Valley, which winemaker Luke Lambert men, so it's their pinot, chardy or nebiollo rose you'll be sipping at the $10 mark. Beyond that, Denton will pour you drops from Mac Forbes, Jasper Button in the Adelaide Hills, Jamsheed, or a fresh riesling from Mount Horrocks in the Clare Valley in South Australia.

There are just three beers: Furphy, Moretti, and Peroni Red, and four spirits: gin, Campari, Antico Rosso, and pastis. You'll love the atmosphere, with plenty of shelving for bottles, large glass windows overlooking the greenery across the road, outdoor seating, and a couple of booths. Despite the Euro theme, not a single bentwood is in sight.

2. Peaches

Location: 301 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

Peaches is another new bar in Melbourne, and you can enjoy drinks on their rooftop and enjoy $7 picklebacks or fried chicken sandwiches. This pretty new cocktail bar marks the completion of Melbourne's new Swanston Street drinking and dining establishment, owned by brothers Sam and Tom Peasnell and Adam Goldblatt, the team behind Preston's Dexter and Takeaway Pizza. They also own Cheek, the barbecue restaurant located underneath Peaches, which draws culinary cues from the United States, China, and Korea. The restaurant features a wine list that leans towards minimal intervention and low-sulfur wines. Peaches tow a similar wine line.

The stunning spot was created by the interior design studio Pierce Widera. It's full of monstera plants, blush-coloured suede booths, and terrazzo tables, all under the refracted light coming from an enormous disco ball overhead.

Peaches has a drinks list that's both serious and fun. You can even order black tea, peach, vermouth, and citrus. The Lucky Strike combines Laphroaig, bitters, and herb-infused vermouth. Creative interpretations of the spritz lead to a separate drinks menu.

3. Meyers Place Bar

Location: 7/24 Crossley St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

If you remember, this is, though, not a new bar. The original Meyers Place was arguably Melbourne’s first laneway bar, a legendary late-night drinking den that closed down two years ago after 23 years of business. Now in its new avatar, this tightly packed bar is, in many ways, exactly the same. It was almost as if it had been lifted up and moved less than 200 metres up the road.

The co-owners, Drew Pettifer, Heather Lakin and Daryl Maloney-McCall, salvaged the original monstrous concrete bar. The chalkboard drinks list, red carpet and wood-panel walls all remain. There is room for 30 people, but only in the main bar. Now, you can also head downstairs to a basement that seats 50. The underground section is sparse, with second-hand tables, chairs, exposed brick walls, and concrete beams overhead.

To drink, a tight wine list of mostly Victorian drops – three reds, three whites, one sparkling – most for $9 or $10. On tap, there are Furphy, Cooper Pale Ale and Little Creatures Bright Ale. And Melbourne Bitter longnecks – it wouldn’t be Meyers without them.

4. Fancy Free

Location: 381 Little Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

Fancy-Free was created by Ryan Noreiks, Rob Libecans, and Matt Stirling, who met while working at the Brunswick bar Black Pearl.

They spent the past few months running Fancy-Free on the go as a series of takeovers and pop-ups around Australia and overseas, and this Little Collins Street spot is the most permanent yet. It runs for around six months before the team finds a forever home. The freestanding glass oblong feels somewhat permanent in some ways. It was once home to 8-bit Burgers, and the plastic chairs lend a fast-food-meets-food-court vibe, but when the bar is in full swing, you hardly notice.

The cocktail list is divided into three categories: No Alcohol (alcohol-free), Low Alcohol (slightly boozier), and Full Alcohol. The bar team prepares most of the elements in a one-day session each week, using a range of clarification and fermentation techniques, and pre-batches many drinks. It’s a refreshing shift from some of the speakeasy-style cocktail bars around town, where menu descriptions and complex preparations take centre stage. The bar staff here will chat you through it if you ask; otherwise, it all feels effortless.

The R&C is an elegant and restrained balance of whisky and pineapple-clarified milk punch. It arrives mostly clear with a slight gold tinge, poured over a single ice cube with a Japanese maple leaf frozen inside. One side of the plain rocks glass is painted with a red swipe of raspberry shrub mixed with Never Triple Juniper Gin. Behind the scenes, it takes days to make but at Fancy-Free, it only takes seconds to assemble. And it is almost as quick to drink.

On the Not section of the menu, the Fancy Float is an iced coffee made with coconut-infused coffee, a scoop of Messina's pandan gelato and tonic. The Arnold Palmer blends mango and peach tea and sherbet lemonade. If you're feeling adventurous, try a gravyback shot, a polarising, sinister take on a pickleback that subs out the pickle juice for gravy. Wines rotate, with low-intervention producers such as Ochoto and Gentle Folk on display, and food, for now at least, is from Sydney's burger joint, Mary’s.

5. Angel Music Bar

Location: 12 Bourke St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

The celebrated restaurateur Con Christopoulos, the man instrumental in bringing us iconic venues such as The European, City Wine Shop, Kirk’s Wine Bar, French Saloon, Neapoli, and, more recently, Butchers Diner, is doing something completely different.

Christopoulos has helped to legitimise and broaden the definition and possibilities of small-hours businesses that were once considered the sole realm of the over-refreshed and non-discerning. Angel Music Bar adds another layer to that mix.

It's not just about nightcaps and winding down. A brilliant, expensive sound system, a constantly changing roster of DJs and music genres, open-air courtyard at the back and a compact hidden Dance Bar upstairs, give Angel a flexibility that can keep the night going against a backdrop of well-constructed cocktails and good-time bar food such as a classic prawn cocktail or a lobster mac and cheese.

The music is equally unpredictable. Some nights, you'll walk into the strains of Dave Brubeck. Opera has been heard, as has electronica, R&B and reggae. There's a good chance there will be dancing, even though downstairs there's no designated dance floor.

The main bar, with its splashes of neon, French oak flooring, and seating limited to the fixed tan leather stools lining the timber and brass bar, features a DJ booth at one end, and is encouragingly free of clutter. At first, it may seem sparse. As the night wears on, the space starts to make sense.

Snacks such as lobster mac and cheese and toasties come from Butcher's Diner next door, passed through a hatch in the wall. Cocktail-wise, it’ll be a Martini. There’s also an Italian-heavy wine list and a solid champagne selection.

The Amaro Old Fashioned is a rich, delicious take on the whisky classic, while fruit-plus-rum-plus-ice choices such as the Junglebird and the Pain Killer are refreshing for those who decide to take a twirl.

Wine and beer lists are compact and reasonably priced, with nothing too challenging in terms of minimal intervention or craft. The food menu, or Room Service as it's called, is delivered via a slot in the wall from next door's Butcher's Diner. There's a solid toasted ham and cheese sandwich, hummus and raw vegetables, French fries and arancini. Boxes are ticket,d and it's available until close.