Noble sweet wines - Part 2: Trockenbeerenauslese

Here in the Ried Steinmühle we see the promising results of an extremely rigorous grape-by-grape selection.

Right adjacent to wonderfully botrytised berries we find grapes that have been spoiled by the vinegar-files—and on top of this there are still a few isolated green and healthy berries on the vines.

This is anything but easy to pick!

It took us three days, but we manage to pull it off—we (ten pickers at work) harvested 540 kilograms of botrytised grapes.

This will yield us 250 litres of Sauvignon Blanc Trockenbeerenauslese.

Anton Kollwentz Sr. had to think long and hard before he could recall a harvest when selection in the vineyard was this challenging — and that was in 1973!

 

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Noble sweet wines-Part 1: Beerenauslese

Indian Summer brought us fog in the early morning and late-afternoon sunshine —the ideal conditions for developing noble rot.

The Chardonnay was picked and placed into colour-coded plastic tubs -- botrytis-berries in the brightly coloured containers, grey ones for the green and healthy grapes.

In one day we were able to harvest 370 litres of Beerenauslese and 80 litres of  "green juice."

 

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Gloria

The first pass through the vineyard Gloria yielded grapes that were totally healthy and very ripe.
The weather could not be better — sunny and not too warm; should remain so for the next few days of the harvest.

We couldn't be happier!

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The last of the red grapes!

We have just had an entire week of perfect autumn weather, during which we harvested our Blaufränkisch from the vineyards Setz, Point and Haussatz.

The clusters and leaf-canopies both attest to the amount of effort we've made this year in the vineyards.

 

Today we are picking the Cabernet Sauvignon — as is so often the case, it's the last of the red grapes to be harvested.

The challenging weather we had late in the summer did no damage to the Cabernet Sauvignon.

The clusters have small berries, loosely bunched with a very good degree of ripeness.

 

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in Ried Point

Up until this morning we were harvesting our Blaufränkisch in the vineyard Setz ('Ried' is an Austrian word, the Germans don't use it);

now the pickers are at work in Ried Point. Thanks to the sunshine during the past few days, the Blaufränkisch grapes

have gotten just a bit riper; they are sweet and fragrant, with firm skins—but still we have to be very careful concerning the selection.

 

Because of this need for caution, the harvest must proceed more slowly, which gives us more time to attend to tasks that are piling up in the cellar:

an increasing number of casks and fermenters, fermentation temperatures and overflowing vats, getting the must into barrels—and much more.

 

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