Stonier Pinot Noir 2025

Written By Campbell Mattinson
Bottle of Stonier Pinot Noir 2025.

Stonier Pinot Noir 2025
$45, 13.5% alcohol, screwcap, Mornington Peninsula.

All the 2025 releases from Stonier have been reviewed to The Winefront site – well worth checking out – but I thought I’d include a note on this ‘standard’ release because it’s a contender for the Best Value Pinot Noir of 2026. I appreciate that $45 isn’t the usual price that you’d associate with value but in comparative Pinot Noir terms it qualifies.

I’ve been tasting and drinking Stonier Pinot Noir for a very long time – 30 years-ish – and this is the best standard Stonier Pinot Noir that I can recall. It’s a pearler. Its quality is so high because it’s more complex than the latest round capital gains tax changes, is beautifully interwoven with tannin, is juiced up with alarmingly more-ish fruit flavour and from start to finish, more to the point, it mounts the most coherent and articulate arguments int its favour. It tastes brilliant, it tastes interesting, it feels the goods and it lingers. I couldn’t be more on board. 95 points.

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This wine was made by Stonier winemaker Julian Grounds, who was featured in the article here.

 
Campbell Mattinson

This post was written by Campbell Mattinson. Mattinson is a former chief editor of the Halliday Wine Companion book, former editor of Halliday magazine, former editor of Australian Sommelier Magazine and founder of The Winefront business. He is the author of five books on wine – four of which were bestsellers (The Wine Hunter, the Big Red Wine Book 2008, the Big Red Wine Book 2009, and the Big Red Wine Book 2010).

Mattinson is also the founder of the Mattinson Photography business.

Campbell Mattinson has been an independent journalist, wine critic and photographer for forty years. He’s the only Australian to have won the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award more than once. He’s a past winner of a Louis Roederer International Wine Media Award; is the author of the award-winning book The Wine Hunter; and is the author of the best-selling novel We Were Not Men. He’s also a winner of a St Kilda Film Festival Award (as writer-director) and is a former winner of the national Best Australian Sports Writing Award. In 2026 three of his photographs were short-listed for the World Food Photography Awards.

Campbell Mattinson, who is 100% independent, has tasted between 5000 and 10,000 wines each and every year for the past 25 years. He tastes blind, in comparative brackets, as often as is practicable.

Campbell Mattinson is a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker and a wine critic. In all of these mediums his prime motive is to tell people's stories.

https://www.campbellmattinson.com
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