The season started with great weather.
April was so warm and the vines had great and fast growing conditions.

This led to a very early flowering which was actually over by the end of may.
The crop levels were very high, so we needed to do an intense green harvest on all varieties.
During summer we often got some rain, so irrigating was only an issue in some critical young vineyards.
Unfortunately we also had some hail in Juli followed by dry weather, so the bruises dried out and didn’t cause any spread of Botrytis.

Harvest started on the 23rd of August. The earliest we have ever had. And on the first day we also had some strong rain and hail. So we needed to pick some varieties in the affected vineyards quite rapidly.

Cabernet Dorsa after Hail during harvest

Because of the bruises, the hot weather, the harvest durch the hot weather, we did a lot of single berry sorting.
But it was also a challenging race of picking the grapes at high speed, because every variety somehow wanted to be ripe at the same time.
Fotunatly we managed to pick all grapes at the optimal aromatical ripeness level, just before the potential alkohol levels shot up too high.

We are very pleased with vintage 2018, even though it was hard sorting work at warm temperatures.

The wines have great depth, beautiful ripe fruit aromatics, great structure, with great shelf life and good potential. Picking out the raisins helped a lot to make really precise Red wines with great dark cherry and berry flavours.