The year started with relatively little winter precipitation.

Budbirst was at the beginning of April and the weather was fortunately not as warm as in 2018 … Of course there was very good weather over Easter … But May was rather cool and the vines did not grow as fast as in 2018 … Our vineyard team had enough time to take away excess shoots and were not chased by having to weave the growing shoots into the trellace.

The flowering then took place in June, which is a normal time-frame and showed us that our upcoming harvest would start in mid-September… What a relief. The harvest in August at over 30°C is a special challenge.

Basically, the vineyard work was generally very easy. The amount of spray treatments needed was very low. The reason was simply the lack of rainfall. But then we had big problems with drought in a few locations. On the one hand in the young plants and in the replanted vines… On the other hand especially in the volcanic soils… The low winter rain falls caused extremely weak shoot growth… In the end we had to reduce the yields especially strongly despite irrigation in order to get ripe fruit…

In June and July there was a severe heat wave.  This caused some grapes to get a little sunburn. But thanks to the sorting machine, we could sort out the affected berries without any problems… In August there was some very suitable rainfall so that the vines could finally recover.

Due to a very good fruit set from the previous year… There were often up to 4 large grapes per shoot… and very good flowering weather the vines were full of grapes… Therefore, an intensive green harvest had to be carried out again…

Harvest started as espected mid- September. The weather conditions during harvest were fine, with mostly dry weather and cool nights. Later on we did get the odd rain. But everthing could be picked at optimal aromatic ripeness.

Most of the 2019 white wines will stay on the lees for at least 9 months to increase the depth, length and shelf life of the wines. The red wines are beautifully fruity, but also with depth and structure. Sorting really helps a lot…