Onannon
About Onannon
Onannon founder, co-owner and winemaker Will Byron is redefining what Mornington Peninsula wine can be. Over two decades of winemaking on the peninsula, he has gained a more precise understanding of the region’s subregions and sites than almost anyone else. His grasp of geographical nuance is supercharged by an intuitive sense of the salient aromatic, flavour and structural characteristics of each batch of fruit, and the courage to act on those instincts. His composed, balanced wines are always long on texture, excitement and personality. They milk the Peninsula’s cool, maritime conditions for slow-ripened flavour and coastal energy, while always dishing up a deliciously intriguing sense of self.
With Will concentrating solely on Onannon from 2021, spectacularly particular single-site bottlings are emblematic of the extra detail across the range. Onannon 2.0 formally launched in 2026, with the amicable withdrawal of Will’s initial founding partners. The arrival of co-owner Pete Finnegan into the fold, plus a custom-built winery on Pete’s supreme Robinson Vineyard in Tuerong, promises a glorious new flourishing for this modern Peninsula flag-bearer.
About Will Byron
Will Byron is the founder, winemaker and co-owner of Onannon. He originally established the label with Kaspar Hermann and Sam Middleton, who became good friends during their time at Coldstream Hills, the Yarra Valley winery founded by James Halliday. Will cut his teeth on this benchmark winery’s Chardonnay and Pinot Noir—while also being treated to several memorable and instructive wines from Halliday’s cellar—during a five-year stint from2003 to 2008.
A desire to find their own winemaking voice led the trio to kick off Onannon with a Gippsland Pinot Noir from the ’08 harvest. That same year, Will worked his first Burgundy harvest at Domaine David Duband. The following southern hemisphere summer, while seeing another side of the Pinot coin at Maude in Central Otago, he struck up a lasting alliance with Marc-Antonin Blain. That friendship led to a string of harvests at Domaine Blain-Gagnard while Will also picked up vintage gigs with Hunter leading lights Brokenwood and Andrew Thomas before settling into a regular rhythm at Stonier on the Mornington Peninsula.
The Onannon side-project continued to gain momentum, with murmurings of high praise in the press and a local trade following for dual Gippsland and Mornington offering. The label was taken into the CellarHand fold in 2015 as Will was being manoeuvred into the winemaking position at Stonier. Through the back half of the decade, that role saw him handle a more diverse and widespread range of Peninsula Chardonnay and Pinot Noir parcels than practically anyone else, while also sitting in the driving seat for Onannon.
In 2021, Will called time on the Stonier chapter to make Onannon his sole focus. The wines, by now an exclusively Mornington Peninsula portfolio, were widely recognised by the trade as cutting-edge examples of the region; uniformly excellent yet brimming with singularity and charisma.
There was, as Will knew and we have subsequently found out, room to grow and add scintillating detail. With Will’s eyes fixed on the Onannon prize, new single-vineyard bottlings added in 2023 and a highly significant change in ownership structure from 2026, Onannon’s horizons have lifted, and the future looks dazzlingly bright.