Broadsheet | First Look: Allis, the Casual Wine Bar by Revered Mornington Peninsula Estate Ten Minutes by Tractor

The cellar door has been revamped and turned into a sustainable wine bar. A selection of current- and back-vintage drops come with matched snacks, while inventive small plates utilise offcuts from the restaurant and produce grown on-site.

Ten Minutes by Tractor is one of the Mornington Peninsula’s top fine diners. A reservation can be hard to snag, and the team recommends allocating at least three hours to enjoy head chef Hayden Ellis’s $195 five-course tasting menu (there’s also a condensed three-course version on Thursdays and Fridays).

Karen and Martin Spedding, owners of the of Main Ridge winery and restaurant, noticed demand for a casual alternative to their high end set-menu experience. So, they repurposed their recently renovated cellar door and last month opened Allis, an all-day wine bar with a low-waste ethos.

“It seemed like a natural fit for us,” Karen tells Broadsheet. “I thought the space looked amazing and it would be really nice to use it in a wine-bar context.”

At Allis, the wine list is made up current- and back-vintage Ten Minutes bottles and a few international options from producers like Robert Weil and Pierrick Laroche. There’s a lot to choose from, but Karen insists visitors shouldn’t be intimidated.

“It’s been our ethos from day one to share our love of wine and education [about] wine,” she says. “We have a great [team] who can gauge people’s interest and where they’re at in terms of their wine journey.”

Despite the transition from cellar door to wine bar, guests can still taste the Ten Minutes by Tractor range, including with a flight of either chardonnay or pinot noir. There’s an option to pair each flight with snacks for $60 a head.

Also on offer is a menu of thoughtful and approachable small plates (priced between $10 and $55) developed by chef Charlie Yates, former head chef at the now shuttered Petit Tracteur, who’s worked in the Ten Minutes by Tractor kitchen since 2016. Most produce comes from 10X, the on-site garden, and dishes make use of offcuts from the restaurant. “We’re trying to create a symbiotic relationship [between the two venues],” says Karen.

Carrots are harvested daily when in season. They’re roasted with fennel and served on crumpets along with horseradish liquorice, brown-butter hazelnuts, pickled fennel and oil made from the carrot tops. Over the coming months, a prolific batch of turnips will be fermented and used across the menu in dishes like charred kangaroo carpaccio with crispy capers and horseradish. Even the oil that accompanies the Jetty Road-beer-and-buttermilk bread is house-made, using olives grown in the estate’s Judd Vineyard.

Ten Minutes by Tractor is named for the time it takes to travel between the three vineyards that originally made up the estate (which has since grown to a total of six vineyards). With that in mind, the Speddings named their new venue after the burnt-orange-coloured Allis-Chalmers farm tractors.

The bar’s interior blends its namesake machine’s signature shade with charcoal walls and honey-hued timber tables. Cathedral ceilings and tall windows create an expansive feel in the otherwise cosy venue, which also features handmade bricks with a sunset colour inspired by the soil at the estate’s 23-year-old Coolart Road Vineyard.

Allis
1333 Mornington Flinders Road, Main Ridge
(03) 5989 6455
Hours: Fri and Sat 11am–9pm, Sun 11am–6pm
alliswinebar.com.au

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By Quincy Malesovas for Broadsheet Melbourne