Tasting Notes (Winter): Stonier Winery, Merricks

Satellite Exhibition - Stonier Winery

2 Thompsons Lane, Merricks

This exhibition offers not only an aesthetic journey, but a grounding presence amid Stonier Winery’s winter festivities: with cane-fuelled firepits and their iconic wines poured beside glowing embers, the art reminds us that creativity - like terroir - is a layered, living inheritance.

Set against the industrial textures of revered architect Daryl Jackson’s corrugated steel and concrete, this site-responsive winter exhibition celebrates the connection between land, material, and memory.

Installed throughout the rustic spaces of Stonier Wines cellar door, these six boldly contemporary works create a visual and sensory dialogue with the vineyard’s winter pulse - where fire crackles, wine breathes, and the land rests before spring’s return.

From the gestural abstraction of Colin Hyett’s molten blues and pinks to the sculptural lyricism of Leisa Wharington’s antlered metal and glass, to Matthew Johnson’s meditation on dusk’s shifting light on the landscape, each work echoes the rhythms of the land and the forces that shape it. Max Patté’s explosion of light hums with chromatic warmth, while the organic swirl of colour and form in Bec Smith’s sculptural work recalls the interconnectedness of our earth systems. Juxtaposing Liam Waldie’s hyper-textural coastal landscape that evokes the geological weight of time, with Baden Croft’s expressive florals - lush, almost feral - each piece speaks to a cultivated wildness that is the Mornington Peninsula.