Mayford Porepunkah Shiraz 2006
High above the Ovens River, overlooking the sleepy township of Porepunkah, the family-owned Mayford Vineyard lies tucked away from view. Nestled in a hidden valley, with unsurpassed views of Mount Buffalo, the shaley hillside plantings give rise to low yielding vines and wines of intensity and finesse. For winemaker-vigneron couple, Eleana Anderson and Bryan Nicholson, the small range of Mayford Wines is the culmination of many years of toil together, which accounts for a large number of lost weekends and fishing opportunities.
The creation of limited quantities of handcrafted wines is underpinned by a unique site in the foothills of the Victorian Alps, sensitive vineyard management, traditional winemaking practices and the staunch support of family and friends.
Released in Autumn 2009
The 2006 Vintage in Porepunkah was warm and dry, giving rise to perfumed and powerful wines. Harvested in perfect condition over the early weeks of March, the small-berried fruit underwent warm natural yeast fermentation in small open fermenters. On skins for three weeks then basket pressed to Siruge and Bossuet oak (50% new) for 24 months, and further aged in bottle for 10 months prior to release. Characteristic, floral nose of violets, turkish delight and blood plum against background notes of earth and game. Power and flavour on the palate with spicy shiraz fruit characters and brambly savouriness. Velvety richness, supple, mature tannins and a firm textural finish. Bottled under cork. Mayford Wines
Porepunkah is within a wine region but I did not move to Porepunkah for wine – by any stretch. In the four years since moving to Porepunkah I have written the word thousands of times, but almost never in terms of wine, even though I look out at a beautiful dry-grown vineyard from my office window and often stumble across the region’s wines at the bistros and pubs of the area. I’m obliged to offer this proviso because this morning I drove a hop-step-and-jump from my house along a winding red-dirt road into a hidden valley, and found a vineyard and winemaker of such potential that I did the proverbial double-take. In time Australian wine could have something special on its hands here, and I wish that it wasn’t in adjectival Porepunkah because then my view on it would seem more valid.
I was struck this morning by the look and management of the vineyard and the philosophy of its maker, though I should have been wise to this some time ago. The vineyard’s name is Mayford. The first time I tasted a Mayford wine was at the Warden’s Wine Bar in Beechworth in December last year, at The Wine Front’s Christmas drinks (i.e. my wife Thalia and I, and the kids). It was the Mayford Shiraz 2005. Rocco Esposito does the wine at Warden’s and he does not list local wines for the hell of it; he has one of those quick, astute palates that always fill me with envy. He had the Mayford Shiraz ‘on the pour’, so after a few glasses of Egly Ouriet non-dose something-or-other, we ordered a couple of glasses of the Mayford. It felt like a quirky thing to do. Like ordering Ayers Rock shiraz in Alice Springs (well, not quite).
I’d like to rave about this wine moment but I can’t.
I can’t because the 2005 Mayford Shiraz had, in retrospect, a good deal of promise, but it seemed to have quite a lot of fresh new oak too, and when combined with the smells and sounds of the restaurant and the few earlier glasses of grower champagne, the shiraz was lost in the moment. I suspect though that I wanted it to be lost: in an ideal world I wouldn’t seek to earn a living by reviewing my neighbours’ work, if you know what I mean.
A couple of weeks later things turned more interesting. At a local Christmas function I had a glass of the Mayford Tempranillo 2006, and to my surprise it was structured and complex and interesting, all three things of which I wasn’t expecting. That time I sat in the early-evening sun and drank every last drop of it, and when the evening turned cold I went home and made a note to source a bottle – to confirm or deny the impression. When I found a bottle I put it in a line-up with many other wines, and only tasted and spat a few mouthfuls. It’s a very good wine. I promptly stuck a review of it in the Big Red Wine Book and then tried to forget all about it. Back to the Barossa beauties and Yarra Valley lovelies for me, thank you very much. Nice day neighbour!
Amid all this I noticed that Mayford wines were at all three of the region’s best restaurants – Simone’s, Range Restaurant and Warden’s – and that the fabulous Movida restaurant in Melbourne also had Mayford tempranillo listed. I asked one sommelier about the wines and she raved – and then said, ‘But you guys are neighbours – you would know Eleana!’
‘We’ve never met,’ I said.
‘That sounds right,’ she said. ‘She’s very shy’.
‘I like shy winemakers,’ I replied. ‘They figure things out for themselves.’
‘You’d like Eleana,’ she said. ‘She’s shy – but confident.’
The Eleana referred to here is Eleana Anderson, who makes the Mayford wines. She’s worked around wine in Germany and for a few places around north-east Victoria, and for three years she was consultant winemaker to the Golden Ball winery in Beechworth. It’s her I visited this morning. I drove about 400 metres from the front of my house, then hooked right, onto a red-dirt track. I felt funny about driving, rather than walking, until the dirt track went on for about a kilometre. I live in the Ovens Valley, which in parts is as narrow as a medium-range rifle shot, and so a hundred or so metres along this road I passed through a cutting to the valley that houses Mayford. A couple of years ago I asked another neighbour whether the hidden valley over the hill had a name?
‘It’s called Hidden Valley,’ he said.
And we both laughed.
‘It has a vineyard in it.’
And what a vineyard it is. I have lived for four years less than a kilometre from it – as the crow flies – but today is the first time I have set eyes on it. It turns out the hidden valley is a tiny valley, and that the Mayford vineyard takes up pretty much the entirety of it. In Spring it’s surrounded by grass and then bush forest, and has the classic ripening bowl aspect of many of the great vineyards. There are flat aspects and ridged aspects. The ridges are made of hungry, shaley soils. The flats are a touch more fertile. All up, there are about 12 acres of vineyard, with room for another acre or two on a bare steep-ish ridge. Turn around, and there’s a gaping close-up view of the rock-flanked Mount Buffalo. This is a private vineyard and it owns its own valley, and the whole scene is much, much cuter than a button.
But you can’t drink the view. To get to the house where Eleana Anderson lives with her husband Bryan Nicholson and two young children, you have to drive through the vineyard, and apart from the fact that the shiraz vines look mature and healthy, there is one other impression: the vineyard rows are spot-on straight and spot-on diagonal, and at a casual glance every spur looks clipped to perfection. This is a vineyard that looks tip-top and primed to go. Fitting then that I first saw it in spring: it looks like a colt ready to take on its first carnival.
‘Bryan is fanatical about the vineyard,’ Eleana says. ‘We are just so incredibly lucky – we fancy each other, and we also have complementary skills. I make wine and he grows it. He still works in the forestry industry and I guess when he first planted this vineyard (in 1995) he thought he’d sell the grapes and one day retire to it, but then he met me and here we are making our own wine.’
Eleana and Bryan still do sell a lot of the grapes but they keep most of the grapes grown on the shaley ridges for themselves. The Alpine Valleys region – which is in many ways a carbon copy of the nearby King Valley region – hasn’t thus far managed to carve a noteworthy reputation, but there are a few immediate differences at Mayford.
For starters, the Mayford vineyard is entirely dry-grown, as it has been since year one – which separates it from about 95 percent of the other vineyards in the region (the only other dry-grown vineyard I know of in the region is the neighbouring Ringer Reef vineyard). Secondly, it ferments all of its wine using wild yeasts only, which narrows the field further. And thirdly, it matures its wines in top-grade, top-priced oak only – Sirugue and Bossuet – at a rate of about 60 percent new. These elements set it apart and, arguably, show in the wines.
Not to mention the fact that all the grapes for Mayford are hand picked. ‘And when I say handpicked,’ Anderson says, ‘I mean that I do most of the picking myself – Bryan comes home and there are all these buckets by the side of the vineyard.’ Apart from the romantic notion of the winemaker picking the grapes herself, there’s the obvious advantage of on-the-vine sorting – Anderson only picks the bunches that look in top condition, paying particular attention to seed and stem ripeness. For each variety she does between three and six picking ‘passes’ per harvest. ‘We don’t pick anything that doesn’t look optimal!’
The grapes are cold soaked for a handful of days before being allowed to ferment naturally in half-tonne and one-tonne batches, mostly de-stemmed but with a small percentage of whole bunches. They do all this to ‘optimise the layers of flavour’. Mayford make three wines: chardonnay, shiraz and tempranillo. The grapes for all three wines are basket-pressed.
For a new label with only a couple of vintages under its belt, Mayford doesn’t seem to be making many mistakes. ‘We wanted to start out the way we wanted to continue, if that makes sense,’ Anderson says. ‘We’re trying to make serious wine, that will last, which we realise is not what the region is known for – but we think this is a particularly interesting sub-region’.
The Mayford wines are good already though they’ve still got a way to go. What seems obvious though is that if anyone is to strike a blow for the Alpine Valleys wine region, Mayford is the producer most likely.
The Mayford Story by Campbell Mattinson, The Wine Front
