Mitchell Sokolin
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an American sommelier and French intellectual Gilles Deleuze walk into a natural wine bar … Sommelier-turned-winemaker Mitchell Sokolin channels his formidable intellect and love of silly puns into his Eleven Sons label. Using fruit sourced from various vineyards across South Australia’s broader Limestone Cost region – with some Pyrenees touriga nacional thrown in the mix, too – Sokolin crafts a tight lineup of wines based on chardonnay, semillon, pinot noir, pinot gris, and syrah, with a grüner veltliner on the way, plus a savagnin for his collaborative label with Shane Michael, Limestone Cowboy. Made using methods from “the natural playbook”, as he puts it – spontaneous ferments, no additions beyond a touch of sulphur at bottling, no new oak – with a cheerful disregard for traditional approaches to any given variety, the Eleven Sons range is as thought-provoking as it is drinkable.