Amoise x Julia Holderness
Each month, Boutique Connection sponsors Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.
This is a collaboration of wine and art pairing where we pair a handcrafted New Zealand wine with the artist’s hero piece. The project explores how taste and texture can echo a visual experience and perhaps even enhance it.
I’m exploring the non-verbal dialogue between art and wine and pairing each artist’s hero piece with a wine that echoes its mood, energy, and emotion.
The aim is to translate visual expression into taste, inviting viewers to experience the artwork through another sensory lens. Each match is intuitive and collaborative, celebrating both the artist’s vision and the craft of our boutique producers.
Aster
Julia described her hero piece Aster, as:
“reassuringly domestic but quietly radical in its reclaiming of craft and feminine creativity".
The wine I’ve chosen reflects that tenderness: textural and comforting, with a nostalgic warmth and nurturing feeling. It’s a wine that feels familiar and homely, much like Aster itself… a reminder that the simplest memories often hold the deepest emotional weight.
Amoise
I immediately thought of the Amoise Chenin Blanc 2024 - a wine that feels equally familiar yet quietly radical in its craft. Chenin Blanc is a wine that is synonymous with apple skin. There’s something deeply domestic and familiar about its flavour. Could there be anything more nostalgic than helping mum to peel granny smiths for an apple stew, and nibbling on the skins? Simple moments that carry both nostalgia and warmth.
Amoise Chenin Blanc 2024 is a wine that carries a sense of quiet familiarity. There is something warm, domestic, and deeply human about it. Chenin Blanc is synonymous with apple skin: that simple, nostalgic flavour of helping nana peel Granny Smiths for a stew, nibbling the curls of green as if it was a daughter’s quiet duty. It’s humble, textural, and full of memory.
Amoise embraces that same honest craft. Foot-crushed fruit, a vineyard-born pied de cuve starter, and a low-intervention approach give the wine a gentle texture that mirrors the hand-made world Julia creates.
Winemaker Amy Farnsworth works with a kind of radical sensitivity herself: minimal sulphites, natural ferment, and techniques that can be risky if mishandled yet in her hands, they become quietly brilliant.
Like ‘Aster’, the wine feels both familiar and inventive, rooted in tradition yet confidently its own.
- Renée Dale
—
JULIA HOLDERNESS The Room at Ashenby
11th Nov - 7th Dec 2025
Opening - Thursday 13th November, 5.30-6.30pm
Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition The Room at Ashenby, featuring a new body of works by Julia Holderness.
In her latest exhibition at Sanderson, Holderness presents a collection of new ceramics alongside selected watercolours from her studio archive — a space hovering between memory and invention. The scene feels familiar yet faintly out of time, like a quiet corner from Monk’s House or Charleston; filled with vessels, books, painted furniture, and soft afternoon light. Decoration of the vases and hand-painted tiles becomes both reverie and research — a way of thinking through pattern, colour, and form. In their company, The Room at Ashenby becomes a site for imagination and memory: to settle, rearrange itself, and set out again.
Read more here.
