Best New Winery of the Year
MEWSTONE WINES, Flowerpot, Tasmania
Winemaker Jonathan ‘Jonny’ Hughes and business partner/brother Matthew combined their passions and smarts to launch Mewstone Wines seven years ago. The brothers fortuitously stumbled on the site – right on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel in Tasmania’s farming community of Flowerpot – while visiting nearby d’meure wines, sparking the move. After earlier gaining an economics degree, Jonny held an office job for around a year before deciding it wasn’t for him. “I’d started to develop an interest in wine, so I decided to loosely pursue it. I never set out to become a winemaker, I simply wanted to try a few aspects of the industry and see where it led,” he says. Dabble he did, completing vintages in Langhorne Creek, the Mornington Peninsula and the Hunter Valley, as well as New Zealand’s Central Otago, Canada’s Okanagan Valley and Barolo in Italy. On return to Tasmania, he was assistant winemaker at Moorilla for almost a decade, but also worked in wine bars and as a wine distributor.
That mix of experience is perhaps key to Jonny’s success as a small wine producer. His brother Matt, meanwhile, is a banker, which adds another edge to Mewstone Wines.
Being named Best New Winery is not their first accolade either, also taking out Best New Act at the Young Gun of Wine awards earlier this year.
The production of Mewstone Wines is fairly limited and focuses on pinot noir, as well as shiraz, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay and riesling. Their initial idea was single-site wines made using fruit from the former cherry orchard that’s now the Mewstone estate, but a recently launched second label, Hughes&Hughes, has broadened those borders. “We have this maritime environment thanks to our proximity to the water and the beauty of that is it’s actually quite disease-resistant,” Jonny says. “The flip side is that it’s a lowyielding site, which is part of the reason Hughes&Hughes came into being.” The new range has enabled Jonny to source fruit from elsewhere in Tasmania, and experiment with interesting styles and techniques.
As far what the future holds, the Hughes brothers have some exciting goals.
“We want to get a cellar door up and running in the next 12 months and also have plans to build an on-site winery,” Jonny says. “We want to be able to share what we do first-hand and for people to experience our wines where they’re grown.” The fact that it’s a spectacularly scenic location doesn’t hurt either.