Eleana Anderson
I sat down last year to a vertical tasting of various Mayford wines and it occurred to me, during the chardonnay bracket but regularly thereafter, that what Eleana Anderson has achieved with this small estate in the Alpine Valleys region of north-east Victoria is nothing short of remarkable. It also occurred to me that Mayford is the Giaconda of the Alpine, in that her wines are always highly regarded on release but when you come back to them, years later, they taste even better again. These wines live and grow and blossom. There are endeavours in wine that are small and hidden and silent, and the easiest thing in the world – as the years grind on, as the cold bears down, as the world busies itself somewhere else – would be to give up on the finer details or perhaps even to give up altogether. Eleana Anderson has stuck hard and stuck true to her small plot of land and in doing so has grown not just wine but importance. She is an important winemaker.
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Most of these images were taken with a small Sigma 35mm f2 DG DN Contemporary lens. It’s probably my favourite lens, for its size, for its build, for its feel and for its images. It’s an unheralded lens. I personally love that this quiet little unheralded lens was used to capture Eleana Anderson of Mayford.
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I did of course once live nearby to Eleana Anderson, in the years when I lived in Porepunkah. My kids used to feed carrots to the horses in the property – not Eleana’s – at the start of her drive-way. If I looked to my left, as we fed the horses, I’d see the drive-way up to Mayford. If I looked to my right, I’d see the house where Jo Marsh of Billy Button wines used to live. Jo Marsh is arguably the person I admire the most in the industry of Australian wine, courtesy of the fact that she hauls an entire region on her back, and does so with such brilliance, and with such care. Eleana Anderson and Jo Marsh, left and right. That’s a vantage point for the ages.
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I’m not sure that I especially love any of these images of Eleana Anderson in isolation. But I like them as a collection. It’s rare for me to have time to take a variety of images at a winery. I’m usually squeezed into a two minute spot. I did of course take these images in colour but they work better in b&w, trust me on that.
