Garagiste

Small production held close to the bottle

The decision stays small before it becomes wine. Barnaby Flanders, winemaker at Garagiste in Mornington Peninsula, works from that premise, keeping the scale close enough for place and fruit to remain legible in the glass. Barnaby Flanders came into the work with a defined act of making: co-founding Allies Wines in 2003. That beginning matters here because Garagiste reads less like a separate chapter than a continuation of the same discipline, a label shaped by limited output, plain naming, and the patience of repeated decisions.

Flanders has described Garagiste in direct terms: “Garagiste for me was about making high quality wine in small production.” The sentence is useful because it leaves the romance out. It gives the bench-side measure of the place. Mornington Peninsula is not treated as a backdrop, but as the operating condition: coast, valley, vineyard and cellar held together through Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, with Pinot Gris and Sauvignon Blanc also inside the house’s frame. His movement “down to the coast,” as he has put it, gives the current work its geography without turning it into ceremony.

Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and named ground

The method at Garagiste begins with small vineyard sites across the Mornington Peninsula, including ground described through grey loams and red ferrosols. Those soils sit underneath a portfolio built around still white and still red wines, especially Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. The house’s language is not broad or decorative; it names place when the bottle asks for it. Merricks Chardonnay, Merricks Pinot Noir and Tuerong Chardonnay from 2019 make that discipline visible, each one tying vintage, variety and site into a finished wine rather than a general regional claim.

Terre Maritime Chardonnay, 2024 extends the line forward. Set beside the earlier Merricks and Tuerong bottlings, it keeps the same small-production frame and the same preference for specificity over volume. Flanders’ signature wines also include Le Stagiaire Chardonnay and Le Stagiaire Pinot Noir, names that carry the idea of apprenticeship into the label itself. The house does not turn that into a long public account of cellar technique. What it does publish is enough to understand the direction: small batch, terroir-driven, light in touch, and anchored in the Peninsula’s cool-climate varieties.

A quiet cellar for close reading

The room around the work is intimate rather than performative. Garagiste’s setting is cozy, rustic and quiet, with private tasting as the point of contact rather than spectacle. That suits wines made at this scale. The cellar and tasting room do not need to compete with the bottles; they give them space to be read closely, one site and one variety at a time.

The mood follows the method. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir carry most of the conversation, with the Peninsula’s sub-regions doing the quieter work underneath. In a place built on small batch conviction, the most concrete thread to follow is already in the glass: Merricks Chardonnay, Merricks Pinot Noir, Tuerong Chardonnay and Terre Maritime Chardonnay, 2024.