Mitchell Sokolin grew up around wine – he comes from a Russian immigrant family in New York City that has made fine wine retail its trade – so it is perhaps no surprise that he fell into a wine career after completing studies in history and economics at Colgate University. After sommelier roles in some of San Francisco’s most vaunted fine-dining restaurants (including Michelin-starred eateries Michael Mina and Acquerello), he set out to become an international “vagabond winemaker,” eschewing formal training and instead racking up hands-on experience via vintages in Oregon, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and Georgia.
While working in Spain’s Sierra de Francia, a disagreement with his then-employer about how best to make wine from the rufete variety led him to launch his own micro-label, M. Sokolin, which eventually morphed over ten or so years into Eleven Sons – a name pinched, with Sokolin’s characteristic erudition, from a Franz Kafka short story. “It was for the most part fuelled by a perhaps egoistical conviction that it should be done differently or that I could do it better,” Sokolin says of his early forays into solo winemaking. “I was wrong often, but I think my understanding and calculations have improved such that I now I hit more than I miss. Or so I hope.” Currently based in Winchelsea, on Victoria’s Surf Coast, Sokolin draws most of the fruit for Eleven Sons from South Australia’s Limestone Coast, working with growers in Mount Gambier, Padthaway, Robe, and Mount Benson.
The region itself makes Sokolin’s commute from the Surf Coast worthwhile. “We have to acknowledge that the best places to grow grapes may not necessarily be in your backyard. Probabilistically speaking, it’s more likely they wouldn’t be,” he says. In Sokolin’s words, the Limestone Coast’s greatest asset “is already in the name. Limestone bedrock, calcareous soils with alkaline pH are an absolute rarity in viticultural Australia, yet the many of the best regions in Europe all share this common thread. There’s a length, freshness and perfume to the wines that is just different here.”
It’s not just the soil, but the climate, too. “Proximity to the ocean is not a novelty for wine regions in the country, but here the Southern Ocean is so close you can smell it,” Sokolin says. “The coldest coastal water in mainland Australia has an enormous impact on the climate and wind, moderating temperatures and blowing away our hats. Like any mythical region worth its salt, we even have a meteorological phenomenon that has a name, the Bonney Upwelling, which helps moderate temperatures, beginning in late summer.”
"The Limestone Coast’s greatest asset is already in the name. Limestone bedrock, calcareous soils with alkaline pH are an absolute rarity in viticultural Australia, yet the many of the best regions in Europe all share this common thread.”
Sokolin brings the full depth of his international experience to the fruit he sources from the Limestone Coast. “I’ve had the privilege of having real breadth of winemaking experience, both geographically and stylistically,” he says. “Over time, naturally, you begin to form your own views about how wine should be made to best reflect the place and produce its made from.” His overriding concern as a winemaker is sourcing quality fruit: “I’m a firm believer in the principle that you cannot escape your produce. In other words, you cannot produce something which is greater than the fruit allows; but you can certainly do less.” He takes a sommelier’s approach to fruit sourcing, exhaustively tasting Limestone Coast wines in search of interesting sites. “Occasionally, there’s a signal in the noise of even a mediocre made wine from a great site, and that is where the vision for a different expression forms,” he says. “If I have one talent in winemaking I think it lies somewhere here, in recognising great produce and having an intuition for what to do with it.”
Those intuitions often set Sokolin at odds with regional winemaking norms – and this is as true of what he makes from Limestone Coast fruit as it is of his initial experiments with rufete in Sierra de Francia or dolcetto in Monforte d’Alba. “I’m quite dogmatic about how I go about direct-press wine making – by which I mean white or rosé wine making – and there’s definitely a particular style I chase,” he says. “The most impressive white wines to me are the ones that deliver texture, length and presence rather than the lean, aromatic and constrained profile that is generally expected of whites. I find the latter can be achieved quite easily with almost any variety, with the right recipe, to produce a serviceable, classically-proportioned white wine. Very few sites and wines can deliver that palate-staining presence I seek without the crutch of oak. With that in mind, I work with sites and varieties that, if guided correctly, I feel can deliver that profile.”
To build that texture and length, Sokolin makes his whites in an old-world manner. “They are the wines that require the lees work, oxygen and extended elevage to build,” he says. “They need the alternative vessels, rather than tanks. I’ve been employing ceramic eggs for fermentation and elevage in conjuncture with old, passive oak barrels of various sizes. The juice and the wines are exposed to lots of oxygen. Lees are stirred, barrels go untapped for extended periods, and sulphur regimens are so low they hardly show up in lab tests. Most vessels see SO₂ only after a year of elevage.” Impishly, he adds: “My mentors would be horrified.”
“You have all the possible flavour and spice you should need in the skins and stems. Employ them judiciously, take what you need from the infusion of juice and solid matter, and take it out of the oven before it burns.”
His approach to reds and macerated whites (better known as orange wine) is practically the opposite. “You have all the possible flavour and spice you should need in the skins and stems,” he says. “Employ them judiciously, take what you need from the infusion of juice and solid matter, and take it out of the oven before it burns. Seal in inert tank away from the vagaries of oxygen and bottle early. Simple. No oak. It will only detract from what you’ve built and insert its own flavour into that void. Why do you need it?” He adds: “The nuance in this approach is of course in how the wine is macerated – and for how long – and there are infinite possibilities here from a classic carbonic maceration – as I do for my Carafage Conseillé Syrah – to the flotation or wet carbonic method I use for my touriga nacional, my grüner veltliner, and my chardonnay/pinot noir/pinot gris blend.”
Making his wines with these methods, and working without the safety net of additives or technological interventions, carries a significant degree of risk. As suits his erudite, cosmopolitan background – many of his cuvée names have subtitles, making them read like the titles of PhD dissertations, and they’re loaded with both silly French-language puns and allusions to thinkers ranging from Gilles Deleuze to Sigmund Freud and Theodore Adorno – he’s philosophical about the failures that attend his high-wire winemaking approach. “Occasionally things do go wrong,” he admits. “I have definitely seen Brettanomyces enter the picture, and volatile acidities can be elevated. I’ve come to recognise the risks, as it seems to be correlated with particular sites, and try to be a bit more attentive to those parcels. Even still, occasionally one gets away from me and could be demoted to the drain.” He shrugs. “The cost of doing business.”
These missteps are fewer, and the wines are cleaner, as Sokolin grows as a winemaker – and in interpreting the Limestone Coast’s unique terroir, this restless vagabond seems to have finally found his calling. He’s recently scaled Eleven Sons up to, in his words, “just about a full-time gig”. “It came from somewhat of a panic that either I would take this seriously, or pursue something else,” he adds. “At the same time, I became convinced that the Limestone Coast had a vast resource of sites whose story wasn’t being told properly. I came here for the unique profile of the wines already being made here, and to raise the standing of a very misunderstood region.”
Sokolin adds, “Much of the potential here is lost to the vagaries of large scale winemaking and the fruit is often not getting the attention, care and vision it merits.” He credits fellow travellers Andrew Burchall (Good Intentions Wine Co.), Kyatt Dixon (Limus), and Anita Goode (Wangolina) as winemakers who are helping to change that situation. “Occasionally, our fruit sources overlap, and yet our wines are all different,” he says. “It’s a fascinating affirmation that there is infinite complexity and variability in any finite set of grapes.”
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