Winemaker Travis Clydesdale: Mitchelton

In 2013 I interviewed winemaker Travis Clydesdale, just as he’d taken over the head winemaking reigns at Mitchelton in Victoria. He’s since moved on, and is now the head winemaker at Devil’s Lair in Margaret River. I went looking for this article because I’ve been so impressed by recent releases of Devil’s Lair Cabernet Sauvignon, 2021 and 2023). This article is posted here for historic reference predominantly and is out-of-date in many important respects. But it’s also posted here because the Devil’s Lair website is irregularly updated at best, and any info on its head winemaker is better than zilch.

It’s tempting to call the Mitchelton winery the lion who never roared – except that it once did.

In the early 1990s, fresh from winning the famed Jimmy Watson Trophy with its 1990 Print Shiraz, Mitchelton on the banks of the Goulburn River in central Victoria was pumping out 300,000 dozen bottles of wine each year, 250,000 of these as part of the Thomas Mitchell range and 50,000 under the Mitchelton name itself. It was a stable, independent, and important winery with Don Lewis – a charismatic and authoritative winemaker – at the helm, where he’d been since the winery’s first vintage in 1973.

Back then, the winery boasted one of the great “go to” wines of its era: Mitchelton Blackwood Park Riesling. They made 20,000 dozen of that wine alone each year. It was a crisp wine with, more often than not, a hint of orange peel sweetness and if they still made it in that style it would be a monty with spiced Asian cuisine.

But they don’t make it in that style anymore and indeed, the landscape is altogether changed. You could now argue that the Mitchelton lion has been dozy for a very long time.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa sang at the winery in 1990 and in both 1994 and 1995 the Mitchelton cellar door, restaurant, extroverted ‘tower’ and grounds won the Victorian Winery Tourism Award, but it was around this time that momentum behind the Mitchelton brand was lost. Mitchelton was bought by Petaluma; both were bought by the Banksia Group; which in turn was swallowed by Lion Nathan. None of these acquisitions were disastrous – the place still looks beautiful today, and the wines are still good – but in corporate hands Mitchelton didn’t attract the investment an asset of this class demands. The place stagnated, and drifted backwards.

Over the past five years, visitor numbers to the extravagant Mitchelton estate – only an hour’s drive north of central Melbourne – have dropped significantly. And in 2011, the winery only produced 5000 dozen bottles of wine under the Mitchelton name. Mitchelton had slipped off the radar.

But it’s about to do something about it. And not something paltry – something big. Last year Mitchelton took the great leap backwards and returned to private ownership. Mitchelton, the great grandiose neighbour of humble Tahbilk, is stirring. This is where the story gets good.

“One of the interesting things is,” new winemaker Travis Clydesdale says, “that I grew up in Nagambie in a house across the road from Don Lewis.” The same Don Lewis who spent 40-odd years making the Mitchelton wines.

“Straight out of high school I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was helping bang in some vineyard posts at Tahbilk when I was offered work as a cellar hand and it’s all kind of lead from there.” Travis studied winemaking before moving to Margaret River, where he worked at Vasse Felix and Deep Woods Estate. He loved Margaret River and would have been happy to stay – except that kids and family made him want to return home.

“We moved without knowing where we’d work. But I was literally halfway across the Nullarbor when I got a call from my dad saying that there was a job going at Nagambie, at Mitchelton, back where I grew up.”

Travis’s dad didn’t know about the Mitchelton job by accident; he’s worked at the Mitchelton cellar door for the past 30 years. “In some ways I fell into winemaking but in other ways I’ve had aspects of the wine industry running through my veins all my life. Don Lewis lived across the road. Dad worked in the cellar door. Mum works here at Mitchelton too, and she’s been here for 25 years. My brother’s a chef and he did his apprenticeship in the kitchen here at Mitchelton. My brother’s a builder and funnily enough he’s working on the renovations to the cellar door. The place has a corporate history but it’s in private hands now and it really feels like a family place now.

“And one of the special things I guess is that Don Lewis, who now lives across the road from the winery, has always treated this place like a kind of second home and I’m not sure that ever sat well with the corporate owners. But most nights these days you’ll see him walking his dog through the vineyard.”

Mitchelton never lost its soul but its soul is being reinvigorated regardless. At its best, Mitchelton is ambition writ large – it’s hard to describe the enormous sweep of the winery roof, for instance, except to say that it’s probably visible from the moon. Everything here is on a grand, white-walled scale. In the 1970s and 1980s the Mitchelton buildings appeared one part impressive, five parts preposterous. Time has caught up with these buildings though and the strange thing is, they now seem far less ridiculous; this is architecture that has aged magnificently. You could argue that all the place needs is a good old-fashioned spruce up.

Though it’s about to get a lot more than that. The cellar door is being completely reconfigured and redecorated – it’s due to be finished in December this year – but the biggest change to the estate is the addition of a 60 room luxury accommodation complex. The restaurant will be overhauled too (overseen by three-hatted chef Paul Wilson, ex Melbourne’s Botanical) with more emphasis drawn to its exquisite riverside location. Plans – as yet undisclosed – are afoot for the tower too, a day spa with-a-view possibly in the works. Concerts on the property will be back on the menu too. These new constructions will happen in 2013. Life, it’s breathing back into this place. Fair to guess that visitor numbers, in two year’s time, will be through the roof.

But the wines are due for more attention too. One of the great strengths of Mitchelton is that it’s never been a fruit salad vineyard; it’s always played to the grape varieties it should be good at. It’s a warm site trapped in the horseshoe-shaped arms of the Goulburn River – which acts to cool the land down, especially through summer nights. Rhone whites and reds are predominantly the go here and ever since the vineyard was first planted – in 1969 – they always have been. Shiraz, mourvedre, marsanne, roussanne, viognier, grenache and (breaking the Rhone mould) a bit of cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay. Plus, of course, riesling.

“We’ve just changed the Blackwood Park riesling back to a label that people will be more familiar with – green with yellow – and while the (white) label we had it in wasn’t bad, since going back to something resembling the old label sales have turned around. People keep coming up to us and saying. I remember this wine – as if they thought the wine wasn’t made anymore.

“There’s a reserve of largely untapped loyalty to Mitchelton and its wines and we think that if we do things right, we can tap back into it. It’s a good story for us but it’s a good story for the industry. The Ryan family (the new owners) are actually investing in this place. I’m sick of staring at the bottom of the barrel – it’s great to look up and see something interesting going on.”

Mitchelton’s new owners, the Ryan family, also own the caravan park at Nagambie. “They’re not just investing in Mitchelton,” Travis says. “They believe in the area.”

In terms of the wines themselves. “The vineyard’s in pretty good shape and so too are the wines, though I reckon you can see the accountants a little too much in the vineyard and the oak the wines have been matured in,” Travis says. “We plan to freshen things up there, move more to puncheons rather than barriques (i.e. 500 litre barrels rather than 225 litre barrels).” Mitchelton has always produced woody wine styles and while this won’t entirely change, a more deft hand on the oak handle is in store.

And with the vineyard assets at Mitchelton – all 115 hectares of them, much of the vines now 20 and 30 and 40 years old – there’s little doubt that the wines the property produces should be as outstanding as the architecture. “We sit beside a deep, wide, cold river,” Travis says, and boast an estate with lots of mature vines. “I think we should be able to produce something unique.”

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The new owners

In 2011 Mitchelton was bought from Lion Nathan by Gerry Ryan OAM and son Andrew. Gerry Ryan founded caravan company Jayco in 1975, is the owner of 2010 Melbourne Cup winner Americain, and the founder of the GreenEDGE Australian cycling team. The Ryans also own The Melbourne Pub Group and production company Global Creatures, which created Walking with Dinosaurs.

How Mitchelton started

In 1967 Melbourne entrepreneur Ross Shelmerdine commissioned legendary Australian winemaker Colin Preece to find the best site for wine grape growing in south eastern Australia. Preece chose an old grazing estate in the Nagambie district for its climate, soil and proximity to water. Ross Shelmerdine called the winery Mitchelton and the vineyard’s first sod was turned in 1969. Don Lewis joined Preece for the first vintage in 1973, and assumed the winemaker’s mantle when Preece retired in 1974. Mitchelton’s winery and cellar door complex – designed by renowned Australian architect Ted Ashton – was opened. The complex came complete with a white 55 metre high tower.