Atop the Sabre Tanker Truck: another Vintage 2012 panorama

Today we brought our Chardonnay base from the Macedon Ranges up to our Pyrenees winery where it will embark on a journey toward becoming our Sabre sparkling.
The Pinot base is already fermenting well, and it looks like a good vintage for sparkling wines this year...

Click on the image for a closer look....

Mitchell Harris Wines at Spring Graze Ballarat

A few pictures from a great night at Lydiard Wine Bar this week. Spring Graze was a satellite event of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and showcased the best of fresh spring produce along with the range of Mitchell Harris wines.

We hand-disgorged a dozen bottles of our new sparkling, Sabre, which was served with fresh plump oysters. The dry, aperitif style was a brilliant match for this seafood canapé.

A Thai salad of spanner crab showed off chef Damien Jones' heritage in Thai cuisine brilliantly, and was matched with our 2011 Sauvignon Blanc Fumé, and our 2011 Rosé.

Through the night we patched in Johnno from his wine-show judging in Canberra, to introduce the sneak preview of Sabre. A great way to bring him in as a part of the evening, but obviously he would have preferred to indulge....

An incredible main of a rare rolled roast of Goldfields Spring Lamb was some of the best lamb I've ever tasted, and a brilliant centrepiece with our reds, 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon and 2009 Shiraz.

And a sublime way to finish the night was a dessert of blue cheese, pear and apple, matched with the fruit richness of our Special Release Muscat.

Make sure if you get a chance to drop into Lydiard Wine Bar in Ballarat

Special thanks to Alicia's sister Sally for the gorgeous images...

 www.sallymckay.com.au 

Mitchell Harris Success at the Ballarat Wine Show

This week saw the annual Ballarat Wine Show take place at Bray Raceway.

The competition sees entries from Ballarat and the surrounding wine regions: Grampians, Pyrenees, Bendigo, Heathcote, Macedon and Geelong.

A great chance for us to benchmark some of our new releases and see what some of the other great producers in our area our doing.

And, of course, a bit of love for some of our babies. This even included a silver (rare for a pinkie) for our 2011 Rosé. A great lid-dipping to Johnno for his great work in crafting our current range, which is finding its way onto wine-lists around the country.

Mitchell Harris Smallgoods for the SMACKDOWN!

How could we NOT be a part of WISS?


Born from a love of all things dead animal, the Wine Industry Smallgoods Smackdown is a smallgoods challenge for winemakers who play with meat. The competition - to decide who has the best tasting smallgoods. 


Wine bon vivants Mike Bennie and Dave Brookes are co-founders and co-Chair of Judges for this most prestigious of competitions. All winemakers who cure, cook, dehydrate, spice, pummel, puree, hang or smoke are eligible to enter their meat goods.


So under the watchful eye of co-opted Mitchell Harris bro, Mick Harris, some fine porkers have met their match and entered the world of WINEMAKERS MAKING MEATS!

Here are a few shots of a recent salami-day at MH HQ...

The Pork Grind...

Filling the tubes...

Lookin' goooood....

Mitch's surgical knots at work...

Into the cellar...

The Golden By-product... crackling...

So come on winemakers, time to measure your meat against ours in Mike & Dave's challenge... the Wine Industry Smallgoods Smackdown! 

Don't forget to follow @mikerism101 and @vino_freakism  for all the goss on TWITTER, and follow us @mitchell_harris to see the progress of our meats!

SABRE by Mitchell Harris...the sneak preview!

With our newest sparkling release, Sabre by Mitchell Harris, only weeks from fruition, we decided it was time to knock the top off one. Johnno did the honours, with, you guessed it... a Sabre!

Stay tuned...won't be long now!!!

Pressing off the Mitchell Harris Mataro

Some quick phone-cam snaps of putting our juicy and silky Pyrenees Mataro through the little basket press today.

The 2011 Mataro is a beaut little parcel of Pyrenees fruit that is already tasting delicious, and will no doubt form the basis of a brand new Mitchell Harris release  next year or beyond.

Cheers Johnno!

Vintage 2011...Bringing in the Mitchell Harris Shiraz

As we lift the cover off the open- fermenter, it's a delicious wave of fruit aroma that wafts out. Like a berry compote dessert and a hint of white pepper to spice it up.


Yep, our 2011 Shiraz is picked, and fermenting away....

In a beautiful little valley in the Moonambel hills there's a patch of Shiraz in a corner of the vineyard, that we noticed last year had some terrific plump bunches of spicy grapes hanging. So for this vintage we thought... "let's have a bit of that!"



Picked last week, the fruit gave us everything we were hoping for... Yummy redcurrant fruit with that zing of pepper on the nose and palate.

A few hundred kilos of Viognier grapes from a few adjacent rows has been tossed in to give just a little lift to those fruit



So, from here, it's a real "Hands-off" approach. Wild ferment, then into a combination of our new and old French oak hogsheads for about 18 months.
And not much else...!




We hope we can leave the fruit to do the talking, and perhaps come up with a delicious, spicy, ever-so-slightly-funky Pyrenees Shiraz true to that little corner of the little vineyard in the little valley up past Moonambel...

Picking the Pinot... Vintage 2011 gets underway

After our 2011 summer of discontent, it's finally come time to start on Vintage 2011! First off the rank is our sparkling fruit, which, after surviving a season of floods and humidity, has benefited from a nice slow ripening period.

The (finally) ripe bunches of Pinot Noir.

As you can see, our Macedon Pinot Noir fruit looks terrific, thanks to some hard work in the vineyard, nestled in the northern foothills of the Macedon Ranges.

Mitchell Harris gathers its Pinot Noir near Kyneton in the north of the Macedon Ranges.

Pressed and processed, it's then back up to the Pyrenees for fermentation and to have Johnno work his magic on it over the next few months.

John Harris surveying the 2011 crop

At that stage, the Pinot will be blended with our Chardonnay fruit, and tiraged into bottle to spend the next three or more years on lees, after which it can be disgorged to make our "Sabre by Mitchell Harris" sparkling.

Those with less patience will see the Pinot Noir pressings blended with our Pyrenees Sangiovese to create our second Rosé release, later in 2011.

Crowd-sourcing the new Mitchell Harris Sangiovese

View Larger Map

In the sensational Pyrenees red-wine vintage of 2010, we were lucky enough to get our hands on some terrific Sangiovese fruit from Shays Flat, near Landsborough on the western edge of the Pyrenees.

An offer too good to pass up, it left us with a little bit of a problem; we'd never made Sangiovese before!

So, what to do? First, we bled off some of the juice in a saignée fashion, to create about half of our Mitchell Harris Rosé 2010 (the other half being Macedon Pinot Noir.) The remainder has now been maturing in old oak hogsheads for about a year now, and it's time to work out what to do with it!

Options included :

• Doing nothing, bottling up as is...

• Blending with some beautiful Pyrenees Shiraz for some bright fruit.

• And/or blending in some Cabernet Sauvignon in a Super-Tuscan style.

With thanks to Anthony d'Anna at Boccaccio Cellars in Melbourne, we put together a bunch of great Australian Sangioveses, and some Italian Chiantis to match the Mitchell Harris offerings against.

It was time to get some clever heads and palates together...

We gathered a few folk together, some from the wine & food scene here in Ballarat, a couple of Sangio-loving medicos and even a couple of ex-Sommeliers for a blind benchmark tasting.

Nine great wines were tasted, and what did we find?

• Australia has some absolutely brilliant Sangioveses, that match it with the Italians any day...

• The straight Mitchell Harris Sangiovese was very much a favourite, and certainly more popular than our blended trials.

• We should all be drinking more of this great food matching wine.

So do yourself a favour, get some Sangiovese into your cellar or onto your table, and while you're at it, keep an eye out for the "crowd-sourced" Mitchell Harris Pyrenees Sangiovese 2010!

Steamed Murray Cod with Tomato Nahm Jim - matched with Mitchell Harris Sauvignon Blanc Fumé

Ralph Kyte-Powell, John Harris, Alla Wolf-Tasker & Claire Winton Burn at the Daylesford Regional Producers' Day at the Lake House.

As promised, the recipe from Masterchef's Claire Winton Burn that matched so beautifully with our Mitchell Harris Sauvignon Blanc Fumé 2010 at the Daylesford Regional Producers' Day last weekend.

Steamed Murray Cod with Tomato Nahm Jim

Serves 2

2 x 150g Loddon Valley cod fillets, skin removed

Murray River sea salt, to taste

2 cloves Australian garlic, chopped

2 coriander roots, carefully washed and coarsely chopped

1 long red chilli, coarsely chopped

1 long green chilli, coarsely chopped

8 ripe cherry tomatoes, coarsely chopped

2 small (or 1 large) red shallot

1 small green chilli, finely sliced (you can substitute a small red chilli if green ones are not available)

3 tablespoons palm sugar, shaved

2 tablespoons Megachef brand fish sauce

60 ml lime juice

Coriander leaves, to serve

• To prepare the nahm jim, combine the garlic and coriander root in a mortar and use the pestle to pound into a coarse paste Add the long chillies and pound to a fine paste. Add the tomatoes and pound until just pulped, then add the small green chilli, the shallots, palm sugar, fish sauce and lime juice and stir to dissolve Taste the nahm jim for a balance of heat, saltiness, sourness and sweetness, adjusting as necessary Set aside until ready to serve.

• To steam the cod, place the fillets on some baking paper in a steamer. Cover, and steam until just cooked through (about four minutes).

• Meanwhile, place a generous amount of the nahm jim on each plate. Once the fish is cooked, place it on top, then drizzle with a little extra nahm jim and top with some coriander leaves.

• Serve immediately with a crunchy salad and some steamed rice. 

The Grampians Grape Escape

This weekend we go west, up to the beautiful Halls Gap in the Grampians for the annual Grampians Grape Escape.

Set in beautiful Halls Gap, there'll be heaps of the locals there with some exciting wine and food choices.

As for Mitchell Harris, we'll have all our new season's wines out for some of their first public sips:

The 2009 Mitchell Harris Sauvignon Blanc Fumé

The 2008 Mitchell Harris Shiraz

The 2007 Mitchell Harris Cabernet Sauvignon

Hope to see you there, we'll be back with news and shots of the weekend next week!

Art on the Tasting Bench

Some blending art, a la Jackson Pollock?

Nice one Johnno...

Follow that Cab....

Ok, so after a few weeks fermenting in our big new shiny open-top fermenters, the 2010 Mitchell Harris Cabernet has been drained out, and hits the presses today. Nice work Johnno, you deserve a beer.

Beautiful fruit from our Moonambel vineyard looks like it'll make one of our best vintages yet, and now set for a stint in our snappy new French Oak barrels.

Stay tuned for more progress...

Mitchell Harris Cabernet 2010 - a work in progress...

A few snaps from this week, showing that winemaking isn't all sitting on a verandah watching the sun set over the vineyard.

The 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon in our open-top fermenters.

If you look closely you can probably even see Johnno breaking a sweat in some of these shots!

Things look promising for a top vintage 2010...

Our Mitchell Harris Future Leader!

Some of you may know already, but the latest news in the MH camp is all about our winemaker John Harris. Not only can he make a cracking drop of wine, he has been selected in an elite group that will participate in the Winemakers Federation of Australia's Future Leaders' program.

Only 15 are chosen Australia wide to attend 14 days of "wisdom sharing" throughout the country. The program involves successful industry leaders passing on little gems of knowledge to the "bright stars of the future" with the aim of creating tomorrow's leaders of the wine industry.

Great work JH!

Egg Yolk Ravioli and Mitchell Harris Sauvignon Blanc - a perfect match?

The tasting bench was christened in fine style over the Easter weekend with -you guessed it- an egg dish. This one was put together by Shannyn from a ripper recipe from Philip Johnson's E'cco Bistro cookbook. 

The egg yolk ravioli with asparagus, truffle oil and parmesan recipe can be found here, and well worth a crack at. 

Out of the fridge came the 2008 Mitchell Harris Pyrenees Sauvignon Blanc, and we were all rapt with the way it married textures with the dish. Its nutty, fumé notes complemented the range of flavours, rather than smacking it with the big fruit stick like some other savvies around. 

Fiddly, but not difficult, have a crack at the egg-rav the next time you're trying to impress. You could definitely do worse than the MH Sauvignon Blanc to wash it down with, too!