With eight pickers working, the harvest goes quickly. Especially since the winged-and-feathered pickers did such a thorough job shortly beforehand.
Where there was no netting, there are now no grapes. Only occasionally did the starlings leave a couple shrivelled berries behind.
The volume of juice from five hectares, which had previously undergone a preliminary harvest, amounts to half a barrique of Trockenbeerenauslese.
Contrary to what one might have expected, the rain in recent days did only slight damage to our Zweigelt grapes – they are crunchy in texture and taste very sweet.
We hardly have to discard any at all.
Today we have a cold morning. We are harvesting our Sauvignon Blanc in the Ried Steinmühle. Spicy and healthy grapes, just like it ought to be.
The starlings have been a colossal nuisance in the past couple days,
and we are very glad that Mario and Dragan have been protecting the grapes from them for ten days now.
Today is the 23rd of August, and we are picking our Pinot Noir in Ried Dürr.
It's really time to get this done, because you can see that some berries are already shrivelling up because of the heat,
and exhibiting a bit of a golf-ball-texture on the surface.
Because of the high temperatures, we start picking at 6.00 and knock off at noon.
The clusters will spend the night in our cool-storage repository until early tomorrow morning,
when they will be de-stemmed and deposited in the pre-chilled maceration tank.
The young vines in our Ried Katterstein have grown quite beautifully, and the trellis wires are being installed.
They help the vines to grow in the proper direction.
Now that the green harvest is finished, we have the time to do this.
2018's vineyard vegetation cycle strides forward, and we are currently occupied with the green harvest, also called 'thinning-out'.
This process reduces the number of clusters hanging on each vine, guaranteeing plenty of sunshine and grapes of optimal ripeness.
… and it takes about as much time as the actual harvest itself will.
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