Boccaccio Cellars

A family has run this Burke Road wine merchant since 1963, building a list weighted toward Italian and French labels alongside a rotating selection of cleanskins and spirits. The same building holds a Mediterranean supermarket with its own bakery, butcher and delicatessen, and upstairs, Enoteca Boccaccio serves a seasonal menu against one of the more considered wine lists in Melbourne's east — the kind of layering that comes from six decades on the one corner. Broadsheet has counted the grocery among the city's best Italian providores, and the trade the cellars draw reflects it: locals stocking a pantry as much as a wine rack. It holds a stretch of the Balwyn shopping strip where big-box liquor chains dominate elsewhere across Melbourne's eastern suburbs. Open seven days, trading into the evening on weeknights. For anyone assembling an Italian dinner from scratch — the wine as much as the pasta and prosciutto — it's the place locals have relied on for two generations.