In 2016, Ryan Ponsford was dining at a Melbourne restaurant when the sommelier said something that changed his life.
“There was a William Downie wine on the table, and the somm said, and I’ll always remember the wording, that ‘Bill had an interest in making an expression of the Australian landscape through wine’. I was like, what does that mean? How does wine have anything to do with an expression of landscape?”
At the time, Ryan was a successful photographic artist who worked specifically with a medium from the mid-19th century called the wet-plate collodion process. Unlike film, collodion interacts with the environment, so everything from the humidity and temperature to an unexpected rain shower or an insect landing on the plate would leave a mark on the final picture.
“What I was making were landscape images in that they were made by the landscape, but they weren't landscape photographs,” he says. “So, the idea of wine being able to represent landscape was something I found interesting.”
The next day, Ryan emailed Bill Downie, who invited him out to his home at Guendulain Farm in West Gippsland. Over the course of several hours, they spoke about the parallels in their work and tasted through Bill’s wines. One – a pinot noir made from his home vineyard – made a particular impression.
“It was completely different to all the others and is still maybe the most aromatic wine I've ever tasted,” Ryan says. “It was so powerful that when I smelled the wine from a distance, when he’d just opened the barrel, I had tears in my eyes just from the beauty of it. It was incredible. And as soon as I tried it, I was like, I need to understand why this wine is so different to the others.”
Ryan worked the 2017 vintage with Bill, and then, in 2018, Bill gave him a tonne of Mornington pinot noir and told him to make his own wine with it. “I was forced into making a business, really, which wasn’t necessarily the plan,” he laughs.
He called it Entropy. “Part of what I was most obsessed with as an artist was the notion of entropy and time,” Ryan says. “And although there’s a lot of lip service paid to the idea of place and time in the wine industry, I came to it very specifically from these ideas.
“It’s also fitting because the kind of winemaking I’m doing could be considered reasonably risky, in that it’s all wild ferments, wild malos, most of the wines are unfined and unfiltered,” he adds. “And learning to do that with enough perspective and understanding so that things don’t implode has taken time.”
Today, Ryan makes a suite of wines from two dry-grown sites he farms in Baw Baw Shire. From the red volcanic soils of the Warragul vineyard, established in 1983, and shared with Bill Downie and Pat Sullivan (they both refer to it as Bull Swamp), he makes riesling, a sauvignon blanc semillon blend, and since the ’24 vintage, cabernet sauvignon.
From Willow Grove, planted just over 20 years ago on a combination of red volcanic and grey dermosol – and which was overrun by blackberries and set to be bulldozed before Ryan took over the lease – he makes savagnin and pinot gris. He also makes pinot noir from Willow Grove, although he wasn’t happy enough with it to release one in 2024. And he used to make syrah from Warragul, although has now switched his focus to cabernet.
As well as his core range, Ryan “mucks around with a few other interesting things” each year. In 2024, which he says was a “Goldilocks vintage” in the region, he made a Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon that he originally planned to sell for $1000 as a statement on wine economics, but realised once it was in barrel that price wasn’t the point of it. “When I grow up into an old guy, I can open it for my children instead,” he says.
He also released a special Jura-inspired savagnin from the 2021 vintage earlier this year, and in 2025, he made a single barrel of rosé from seven rows of pinot noir vines that mutated after being grafted to pinot gris, and now yield both varieties in every bunch.
In 2019, Ryan and his family bought a property in the foothills of the Strzelecki Ranges, and the plan is to establish a high-density (10,000 vines per hectare) pinot noir and chardonnay vineyard on it in the coming years. Although, “at the moment I’m farming almost six hectares on my own, which is enough to manage for the second!”
Mostly, he’s content with just exploring. “I want to keep doing the things I can do year in, year out, but also have a series of vintages and single barrels or other bits and pieces just for me to pique my interest really.”
See how Jane Faulkner scored the 2024 Entropy wines below.
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