Mitchell Harris Urban Cellar Door - The Progress so far...

The creation of our new urban cellar door is well underway this week as we tackled the walls and floors, 120 years of dust, grease and sweat blown away with some high-pressure water, revealing red brick walls which have kept their patina of years of workshop and produce store history.

See some of the pictures of the workshop prior to kicking off HERE

Over the next few weeks, our hoardes of builders, craftsmen and designers will march on in and create our Cellar Door, which we hope will be open early in the spring.

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 Macedon Vineyard Panorama

Another little panorama, this time our Macedon vineyard with it's nicely laden Chardonnay vines, which we'll be picking tomorrow for our flagship sparkling, Sabre by Mitchell Harris.

Click on the image for a larger view...

Stomping the Mitchell Harris Shiraz

Getting in the whole-bunch spirit, Johnno gets right into stomping our 2012 Pyrenees Shiraz.

Warning: may contain scenes of whole-body pigeage!!!

Off and Picking... another cool panorama

Another cool panorama of a short lunch break as we kick off Vintage 2012 picking our Sauvignon Blanc.

Beautiful vineyard here in the Moonambel Hills...

JH

PS Click on the pic for a bigger, better view...

The Winery at Rest...A Panorama

With the first day of picking tomorrow, the winery is poised, ready to roll.
A little panorama of the last day of rest before Vintage 2012...
Cheers,
Johnno

A walk through the vineyard

The Peerick Vineyard at Moonambel

 Great to have a walk through the gorgeous Peerick vineyard out of Moonambel today. What a great little oasis in the Pyrenees! Vineyard looking great. Disease free so far... 
Cabernet almost through flowering.
Looks like lower yields this year which will hopefully translate into some good concentration of flavour.
Fingers crossed for more sunny days like today!!

The Mitchell Harris 2012 Fumé 

The Mitchell Harris Winery (-to-be) ...a sneak peek!

The great old facade of our new Mitchell Harris home.

This month we've made some terrific new leaps ahead in the Mitchell Harris adventure. One of the most exciting is the purchase of a new headquarters for Mitchell Harris Wines. Hopefully over the next few months to a year we'll see the advent of a new urban Cellar Door, and a warehouse and cellar for our goods, and potentially even start doing some of our smaller batch winemaking right here in the middle of Ballarat!

The old ledger book circa 1896

We've been lucky enough to find a terrific old shop and warehouse that started life as a stables / livery in the 1890s, and became what was probably one of Ballarat's first motor garages around the time of WW1. It spent the next few decades as a canvas / tent-maker's workshop, and since the mid-70s has been an electrical motor workshop.

Heaps of great old Victorian details (in need of some love...)

Our new home is right in the middle of Ballarat's CBD.

A panorama view of Ballarat from the back balcony.

Tons of character, tons of history and tons of space. Just what we need...

The cluttered but characterful front-of-house, hopefully soon-to-be our Cellar Door.

Johnno's new world in the old bluestone stables / garage / workshop (WINERY!!)

Over the next few months we'll post more pics and let you know as soon as you pop in for a glass or two!

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!

Wine Fiction: Dark Vineyard by Martin Walker

I thought recently I'd expand my feel for the wine game by having a look at a few novels, to see what sort of wine-related fiction is out there for oenophile reader. So to kick off, I picked up this little page-turner that promised to give the reader a bit of mystery in "la France profonde."

The plot revolves around the goings-on in a tiny rural village in the Dordogne, where it seems an outbreak of Eco-terrorism may be about to consume the locals and their sleepy valley. Into this marches local Police Chief, Bruno Courrèges, who, as well as hunting, cooking, and coaching the kiddies' rugby team, keeps a firm finger on his community's pulse.

A huge multinational wine company is looking longingly at the valley's untapped winemaking heritage and (so far) cheap land values for their next shiny mega-winery, and there is some good, thought-provoking material here on whether the new jobs promised might be good for such a tiny hamlet, or whether something more than land gets sold off when big producers move in. Some themes run throughout the book that would be familiar to many of us involved in Aussie winemaking.

There are plenty of mouth-watering food and wine moments throughout, well-rounded characters, and it's easy to see this would have been great fun for hard-nosed business and political journo Martin Walker to write, presumably on or inspired by his yearly sojourn in the Dordogne.

It's great fun to read, and I look forward to hooking into some of the others in the Bruno Courrèges series... Keep an eye out for them!




WINE MATCH: A Bordeaux, let's say Chateau Petrus 1961?
FAILING THAT: Mitchell Harris Cabernet Sauvignon 2009 ...;-)

-Mitch

Dark Vineyard
By Martin Walker
Published by Quercus 2009

Vintage 2011...Bringing in the 2011 Cabernet

Getting toward the end of our long, late, cool vintage of 2011 and it's time to head up into the Moonambel Hills again for a look at how the 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon is travelling.

Some brilliant work in the vineyard throughout the growing season has kept the floods and the rot at bay, and we've got some gorgeous big black bunches hanging there, ready for picking.

Always hard of course to judge what this season's weather will do over the next week or so, so it's time to work out whether to take the leap and start picking.

Johnno checks the sugar content on the refractometer, basically a prism that reacts differently according to the sugar content of the sample inside it. With the Cabernet at 12.5 Baumé, and the weather ahead looking let's say, a little dodgy... 

It's time to get in the fruit, about 7 tonnes, and start the fermentation for our 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon.

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...

Just a Minute... The Mitchell Harris 2011 Sauvignon Blanc Fumé

Mitch and Johnno have a quick squiz at some beaut Sauvignon Blanc juice picked this week in the Pyrenees.

The cool 2011 looks a terrific vintage for our latest Fumé....

Just a minute... The Mitchell Harris 2011 Rosé

We've just pressed off our Pinot Noir, sourced from both the Pyrenees and Macedon Ranges, which in addition to being part of our Sabre sparkling, will be incorporated into our 2011 Mitchell Harris Rosé.

Here Mitch and Johnno have a quick minute-long look at the new juice, which is just about to go into barrel to create our rosé.

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.

Mitchell Harris Wines and the iPad

With the release of the iPad today, we thought we'd explain how here at Mitchell Harris as we've incorporated the iPad into our everyday workflow. With a couple of iPads, our iPhones, home and work computers and some cloud technology we can all stay in touch, have up-to-date figures at hand, and stay on top of sales and marketing.








A few of the benefits of bringing the iPad into Mitchell Harris Wines:

Saving trees and the clutter of paper tasting notes and pricing documents. On our trade visits, sommeliers and wine-buyers can peruse prices and winemaking information without piles of paper being printed out and cluttering up offices and bars. Winemaking info is always at hand when showing the wines.
Any documents that sommeliers want to keep can be emailed through immediately.

Staying on top of inventory. We know continuously where stock is being sent, and what remains in the warehouse or winery at any particular time.

Sales orders can be sent through immediately to the warehouse, and invoices generated, receipts sent, all pretty much at the site of the sale.

Using the Apps such as Numbers, we can work on our production or sales spreadsheets on a train or anywhere, continuously uploading them to our "cloud," where we can all contribute at any time.

Our photo library becomes a "stock library" where we have access to Mitchell Harris images (such as bottle images,) that we can then use in blogs, emails or the like. (It also looks terrific as a slideshow when out pouring and selling booze!)

Getting photos onto the iPad is really easy with the camera connector, then editing them with Photogene, CameraBag or something similar we can share great images in no time.

Blogging (I'm writing this on the ipad using BlogPress now) or staying in touch via Twitter or Facebook is obviously a doddle with the iPad, and makes good use of the odd spare moment. So too is replying to emails whilst out and about.

It's an ultimate note-pad / diary / ideas depository.

A bit of down-time whilst on the road is easily filled with some books on iBooks or a couple of mags on the Zinio app.

So there are just a few ways the iPad has helped a tiny winemaking business like ours, love to hear if you've any great ideas or tips.

And, of course, here's our fearless winemaker, John Harris using a massive spreadsheet during his trial of the brand new iPad...





Stick to the fermenters and barrels JH!

Keeping it Small - Keeping it Real - via Sagmeister

Some great thoughts from 2 terrific creative minds came in on their respective blogs over the weekend.


They centred on thoughts of Austrian designer Stefan Sagmeister, whose commitment to keeping things 'small' has kept him at the forefront of design, and kept a big 'hit-rate' of his projects actually achieving success.


Like waistlines in ancient societies, sometimes it's all too easy too equate size and growth with success. For a small, no, tiny wine producer like Mitchell Harris it helps to remember that we can use our nimble, small size to remain creative and independent.


"We never grew, always stayed tiny, and it serves us very well over the years, allowing us to pick and choose projects, and keeping our financial independence from our clients." -Stefan Sagmeister


As top photographer Chase Jarvis says in his blog:


"Your client list can get big. Your staff can get big. Your hopes can get big. Productions can get big. Even invoices can get big. But none of that means a thing unless you’re doing work that you believe in and doing it well. And only you can measure that for yourself. Where do you want to go and what do you want to do?"


For a new, tiny winemaker, trying to show a bit of creativity to the world, some inspiring stuff from a couple of guys who are out there, creating every day. For us, it means finding our region's top fruit, and making the best wine we can. Something that will actually make it out there so at least some of you can enjoy it...


Cheers




Thanks to The 99% Blog.

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...