The Winery Weekend Playlist

Three of our favourite tunes this week to kick off the weekend's festivities / relaxation (select one or both!)

This Melbourne gang are getting a bit of Triple J love at the moment, we're hanging out for the new album from Buchanan , due soon...

Love the quirky alt-rock from Brendan Benson, and his new album, What Kind of World , is no exception, great beats...

And an old favourite here in MH-land, it's great to see Something For Kate back on the bandwagon...

The Mitchell Harris Winter Warmer Six Pack!

It's cold...so damn cold out there! 

Who needs a little WINTER WARMER ???

That's right...a tasty 6 pack for only $120!! 2 x Sangiovese, 2 x Cabernet Sauvignon and 2 x Mataro Grenache Shiraz (new release).

Just email us on info@mitchellharris.com.au to get your hands on this ripper 6 pack offer.

Free delivery in Ballarat, $10 everywhere else.

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.

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

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!

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...

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.

Art on the Tasting Bench

Some blending art, a la Jackson Pollock?

Nice one Johnno...

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...