Our Wines of the 2009 Vintage

Our “first” vintage with a new team proves that difficult circumstances often bring good results. The vegetation period began rather innocuously with a warm spring, from which proceeded a very early bud break and a similarly early flowering. Well into flowering the weather fell completely to pieces, with heavy rain and a major drop in temperature. As a result, the flowering period was very long and left many berries unfertilized (which eventually led to extremely low yields, roughly 35 hl/ha) and caused dramatically different stages of development among bunches, sometimes even on the same shoot. As a result the early summer was extremely worrisome, since every day we were confronted with an almost tropical situation: warm days, extensive afternoon rains, putting the grapes “to bed” with wet leaves and high temperatures. We feared problems with the results, however the weather had surprisingly little effect upon us.

Because what makes fungus happy also stimulates the remaining vegetation, by late summer a very early harvest was in the cards. The vintage came to its appropriate close with a sunny days and cool nights, tailor-made fall, and – with a little bit of luck – we finished the harvest on the night before a newly arriving low pressure zone.

Must weights lie on average around 95° Oechsle (not including the nobly sweet wines) and we are very pleased with the ripe, mild, but penetrating acidity. In this early, yeasty phase, the wines have shown an exotic fruitiness and a clean, almost salty minerality.