The march of time can do strange but wonderful things to your path in life. “I always said, by the time I was 40, I didn’t want to be cooking full-time anymore,” says Matt Stone, a chef who, for many, defined what zero-waste looks like in the Australian kitchen and beyond.
“I love cooking, I love our restaurants, I love everything about it, but I feel now like I can do things in a better, more productive way, rather than being the guy turning the lights on and off every day.” While that could read as Matt saying he’s ready for a slower pace, any notion of that is sidelined with his move from the Northern Rivers to Adelaide and the establishment of Wines by Matt Stone.
The snarkier observer of Australian wine might ask, do we need chef-incomers, and what exactly does Matt bring to the party in his adopted Basket Range? Well, he’s by no means a novice on the wine front.
As an apprentice chef at Leeuwin Estate in Margaret River, wine would have been a formative element. At Oakridge in the Yarra Valley where he was co-head chef, he made his first wine (a sauvignon blanc) under the Amble label in 2016. For a time, back in the strange days that were Melbourne in 2021, he lived, cooked and welcomed guests to Greenhouse by Joost, a zero-waste “future home” in Federation Square. While he prepped and cooked with his then-partner Jo Barrett, he was also across selecting and serving the wine to guests at this forward thinking pop-up. All seeds for the future.
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“I’ve always had a fascination with winemaking,” he says, “and because I cooked at wineries for so long, I’ve always been around it and I’ve always really got along with winemakers.” Asked if there are advantages to his training, it’s a typical Matt answer – matter of fact. “It’s just working with the palate. I’ve spent two-and-a-half decades training and thinking about food, how to taste food, how to understand flavour combinations. I feel that’s given me a back catalogue of profiles and flavours to understand and find in wines.”
To twist the notion of it takes a village, Matt has surrounded himself with “the right people.” His good friends in and around the Adelaide Hills just happen to be Aaron Fenwick of Château Comme Ci, Comme Ça (himself a former hospo gun at Orana and the Summertown Aristologist), Brendon Keys of BK Wines, the eponymous Mac Forbes, and James Erskine of Jauma. French transplant Jean-Baptiste Courdesses of Jean Bouteille Wines has, like others in the tight-knit group, become a “kind of mentor,” the two leasing the former home of Jauma for their respective labels.
In 2024, Matt had planned on heading to Adelaide to help during vintage. When life got in the way, it was pushed up the agenda for 2025. “I’m just going to go for it, I’m going to go to Adelaide, we’re going to drive over, buy some tanks, buy some barrels, and just have a crack at it,” was his pitch to his wife, chef Alanna Sapwell-Stone. “We were having a great time in Adelaide, Alanna did the drive with me, and then she was going back and forth to Byron,” he says.
“Then, we just kind of looked at each other and went, should we move here? We weren’t really interested in opening another restaurant individually, on our own, because we’ve finally got ourselves out of debt from restaurants and I’d like to keep it that way. I think it’s great to partner with people that have deeper pockets. Alanna had an opportunity to work with Blanco Horner [owners of Restaurant Botanic], which was out of nowhere. Everything said we should move here.”
In March 2026, three cuvees will be released, alongside two joint ventures with Courdesses. Stylistically, Matt is open-minded. He talks about pinot gris as an example. He references a chat with erstwhile Margaret River winemaker Sam Vinciullo, who makes wine in stainless steel, never barrels.
“I found that interesting, and the same day BK and I picked the same fruit from the same vineyards, and we made the wine in totally different ways. He gave me advice and I didn’t take it, I kind of listened to Sammy.” Now when these two wines are side by side, they are completely different, says Matt. “I love that idea: he made more of a grigio style – a really crisp, clean white. I’d left it on skins for five days, so it’s orange and it’s got texture, but then I decided to not put it in barrel, so we still had this lovely acidity, a kind of savoury tomato leaf thing that comes through, which would have been subdued by the barrels.”
Matt talks about the synergy of cooking and winemaking, that you must make a choice at a certain time – with cooking you have an instant result, whereas in wine it’s months and years. A good metaphor for life if ever there was one.
This article first appeared in issue #82 of Halliday magazine. To receive the magazine, unlock digital access to 190,000 tasting notes, and more, become a member now.
