The season started with a relatively mild winter. Temperatures in March remained low, but it was sunny and dry. April started wet and cold with ideal conditions to finish off bending down the canes. Budbirst was middle-end of April.

Unfortunately we had some late springtime frost in two vineyard sites at the bottom of the slopes. Luckly, we left some additional reserve canes with some additional crop. But ripeness levels will be uneven at harvest.

May was very challenging… Extreme rainfall and only a few days when it was dry enough to get a grip on the growing grass under the vines.

In March it was still dry and easy with the tillage…

… but at some point the grass grew much faster again …

In June, the next big low pressure area arrived. Cold weather and a lot of precipitation caused extremely big worries amoung the winegrowers.

Especially the fungal Peronospora loves dampness and warmth… and in some cases the winegrowers could only watch how the harvest was strongly decimated this year…

The flowering started relatively late. At the same time, the weather was modest, so that not all seeds were fertilized and yields were naturally low. Thus ideal conditions for high quality.

Summer was nice and warm, but not too hot. Spotted wing drosophila didn’t grow as fast as in 2014.

We started harvest on the 19th of September with the base wine for our Sekt. Spotted wing drosophila caused some injured berries in our top Pinot Noir site and we needed to do an intense berry selection, sorting out infected and shrivelled berries.

On the 4th and 5th day of harvest the first Rivaner grapes were harvested and sorted in the winery. Also Pinot Noir from plants with a high proportion of shrivelled berries. The first Pinot Gris grapes were also harvested in the first picking week.

The second picking week started with a wet and warm weekend. So some Rivaner vineyards were affected by some starting Botrytis infections. But no Problem, as we could sort out all of the infected berries with the help of our optical sorting machine.

The rain and later on cooler weather helped slowing down the ripening process.

In terms of picking grapes with a ripe fruit flavour profile… it was a magnificant vintage. In hotter vintages like 2015 or 2017 you couldn’t wait that long because of sugar levels that would have been too high.