Stonier: Producer profile and eight wines to try

Wine and finance are often neatly compartmentalised in our minds, but the cyclical nature of global money markets has made one Australian Pinot Noir icon come full circle – from family foundations through the churn of corporate ownership back into family hands.

As of December 2022, three local families are now the proud owners of Stonier, one of the great names of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.

Scroll down for tasting notes and scores of recent Pinot Noir and Chardonnay releases from Stonier

‘It was 20 years of family-ownership, then 20 years of corporate ownership and now it is owned by families again,’ says co-owner Aaron Drummond who describes himself as a ‘local boy’, having grown up in the Mornington Peninsula and even swum in the irrigation dam of the Stonier estate as a teenager.

‘My dad and grandfather weren’t vineyard owners,’ he explains. ‘But there is a reality of spending time in my youth at Stonier, growing up around it and developing an affinity for it.

‘I went off to do business degrees, not oenology, but I love farming, the business and the network. Spending time at Stonier was very formative.’

Indeed, he used his business degrees to have a career in wine, becoming brand manager for Mount Langi Ghiran in Victoria’s Grampians region. When the winery came under the ownership of the Rathbone Group he became sales and marketing director but insisted on working the vintage every year.

He was then hired to head up Craggy Range in New Zealand in 2015 – a post he only left in order to come home to run Stonier for this family syndicate. ‘I’ve worked for big companies,’ he says, ‘but there has always been an entrepreneurial streak and I have always loved farming.’

Putting Mornington Peninsula on the map

Stonier is the third-oldest winery in the Mornington Peninsula. It was founded by Kenneth Brian Stonier (known as Brian) then managing director of book publishers Penguin Australia. He bought the land in 1976 and planted Chardonnay in 1978, followed by Pinot Noir in 1982.

‘He wanted a little vineyard,’ explains Drummond, ‘so planted six hectares.’ By doing so, he became one of the first Pinot Noir producers in the Mornington Peninsula.

It is a paradisiacal region, about a one-hour, 80km drive south of Melbourne, with a breathtaking coastline on the Bass Strait, dreamy beaches on Port Phillip Bay and almost pastoral farm country in between. No winery is further than 7km from the ocean, and the volcanic soils and sunny but temperate climate are made for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

A few brave souls pioneered these varieties, with Brian Stonier releasing his first Pinot Noir in 1986. But, like Drummond says, he wanted more than a hobby horse: ‘He had the ambition of building a great winery.’

A few years after his first vintage, he commissioned the then foremost Australian architect Daryl Jackson to design a winery. It opened in 1991, when the world was still reeling from the Black Monday stock market crash of October 1987. A local politician speaking at the inauguration hailed the winery as ‘a beacon of hope, not just for the Mornington Peninsula, but for the youth and the country,’ notes Drummond.

Stonier’s vision proved true. His 1997 Reserve Pinot Noir won Decanter’s Best New World Red Wine of the Year, and the 1999 Reserve Chardonnay won the International Wine Challenge’s Best White Wine of Show. Stonier had put Mornington Peninsula on the world’s fine wine map.

Changing hands

By the late 1990s, however, Brian Stonier was getting on and had nobody to succeed him. ‘He did not want to sell to a beer company, so he looked for another suitor and found Brian Croser who had founded Petaluma, because that was focused on fine wine, despite being publicly listed,’ says Drummond.

At the time of sale in 1998, this was hailed as a win-win situation, which would ensure the continuing fine wine ethos of Stonier. But it did not last.

Petaluma itself was bought by brewery giant Lion Nathan in 2001, only for them in turn to be bought out by Kirin in 2009. Kirin sold off its wine arm to Accolade in 2016, which was then majority-owned by US private equity firm Champ. Champ was then bought in 2018 by another private equity firm, The Carlyle Group.

The sums involved climbed ever higher and, with another global crisis induced by the pandemic, Accolade entered into a fire-sale of its non-scalable assets. Naturally, a fine-wine business on a small peninsula by its very nature is not scalable.

Drummond sees the hurry to sell as a stroke of luck. The land had been lined up for sale as a property development opportunity with the neat lifestyle element of a winery – to be leased out – in the millionaire’s playground that is Mornington Peninsula.

Stonier at a glance

Early timeline Brian Stonier purchased land at Merricks on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula in 1976, planting both Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon in 1978. The Cabernet was not successful, so he planted Pinot Noir in 1982.

Current owners Circe Wines, a syndicate of the Drummond, McLeod and Thickins families, all from Mornington Peninsula.

Vineyard area 26ha of estate vineyards plus 40ha of leased vineyards across Mornington Peninsula.

Varieties Pinot Noir, Chardonnay

KBS Vineyard (named after the founder) is a classic cool-climate vineyard, planted to both Chardonnay (in 1978) and Pinot Noir (1982), about 1.5km from the sea with basalt-derived red ferrosols – an iron-rich clay – east-facing turning slightly north.

Windmill Vineyard, also on basalt, was planted purely to Pinot Noir in 1996, and is a very sheltered north-facing vineyard – ‘a real heat-trap’ – says Drummond, and seamed by ridges that protect it from the southerly winds that come off the Bass Strait.

The fact that this deal fell through allowed the family syndicate to afford the purchase. ‘That is the challenge: the lifestyle value of the land is much higher than the vineyard value,’ explains Drummond. ‘It is part of the drama and part of the fairy tale, and I guess the whole of the Mornington Peninsula is against that kind of property developer.’

A fine wine project

‘Stonier is not a rich man’s folly, it is a fine-wine project, with some of the best vineyards on the Peninsula,’ says Drummond who is keen to stress that the vineyard stood the test of time, despite lack of investment by Accolade.

‘There were people here who cared. I look at the wines [from that time] and they are superb. These old vines, even without a lot of investment in equipment, produced great wine.

‘Today, instead of making 35,000 cases, we will make 12,000 to 15,000 cases. We are essentially halving the volume, making better wine,’ says Drummond. ‘The ambition is for Stonier to be the fine wine benchmark on the Mornington Peninsula.’

Luckily, current winemaker Justin Purser was already in situ, having made the 2021 vintage still under the previous ownership, while viticulturist Tim Brown is a new hire with the expertise to convert the vineyards to organic farming.

‘We have got the right amount of resources now. It is the detail in the vineyard that is going to be the key in the wine moving forward.’

Being in a tourist hotspot means that Stonier could easily sell most of its wines at the cellar door. While that is profitable, it does not put the brand on the world map. ‘But that was Brian’s initial ambition,’ says Drummond. ‘So we have come full circle. I love the culture, history and ambition of fine wine and it is good to respect that. This is one of the great sites on the Peninsula and we need to farm it as such.’

Stonier: eight top wines to seek out

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