Wine in the Mountains, 2014 in Sölden

Let’s get out of the cellar and head for the hills!

…on this occasion it was “Wein am Berg” in Sölden, southwest of Innsbruck in the Tirol.

 

Angelika Falkner from Sölden’s Central Spa Hotel, along with many of Austria’s greatest winegrowers -

Die Renommierten Weingüter Burgenland (Prestige Estates of Burgenland) plus Schönberger, Schwarz, Hirtzberger, F.X. Pichler, Schmelz, Bründlmayer, Seifried, Alphart, Reinisch, Wess, Wieninger, Gross and Sattler -

invited pampered guests to a wine tasting ranging from our base camp at 1300 metres elevation all the way up to the restaurant IceQ at 3048 metres.

 

And of course we had famous chefs on hand to prepare the culinary accompaniment to our wines:

Johann Lafer, Gottfried Prantl, Harald Rindler, Alexander Waschl, Taketoshi Minami, Yau Kim Yew and pâtissier Christoph Lindpointner

were all on hand with knife and ladle...

 

www.kollwentz.at

All of our wines are in the bottle!

After first getting the white wines done, all of the top 2011 red wines have now been bottled--even though they’ll be waiting until September to be shipped.

And of course the red wines come in big bottles as well--ranging from the magnum to the 18-litre Melchior.

 

The bottling tanks are now empty, and the stockrooms are once more halfway full after a long dry spell.

Now we’re labelling the wines and getting them ready for delivery, since the white wines will go on sale at the beginning of May.

 

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On the bottling line

The day when we bottle the wines constitutes a high point on the Kollwentz Estate’s calendar. It’s the ultimate delicate step in the process of our grapes becoming wine. In order to maintain the wine at its highest standard of quality and expressiveness, it is necessary to transfer it as gently as humanly possible from the casks--with only a very delicate filtration--into the bottle. And to ensure the optimum corking, the remaining air space in the bottle is filled instead with CO², which can afterwards dissolve in the wine, and so causes no backpressure inside the bottle. This backpressure is reduced further by directly creating a light vacuum during the corking process. We use corks of the highest quality-grade—they will henceforth accompany the wine on its long road toward maturity.

 

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Shredding vine wood for the wood-chip furnace

The warm and dry weather we’ve had recently causes the old vine wood to dry out rather quickly.

So it’s the ideal time to get out our mulcher/collector and gather it up, at just the right size for our wood-burning furnace.

We’ll let the wood dry out in the courtyard just a bit more, until the moisture-content shows under 10%.

This furnace enables us to heat the entire winery, and can also provide cooling by means of a transducer.

Removing dead wood from the wire trellises

After we spent seven weeks pruning the vines, it was time to remove last year's superfluous wood from the wires.

This amounts to some ninety percent of the previous year’s growth.

Only after doing this can we bind the vine’s single remaining shoot to the wire.

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Winter comes to Burgenland!

...well, after our first almond tree began to blossom on the 20th of January,

the winter we were waiting for finally arrived, and with it the snow.

It’s rather nasty outside today, so we are busying ourselves with work in the cellar and the office.

 

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Pruning our "Methusalemreben" in the Steinmühle

Now we’re pruning the Sauvignon Blanc vines (planted 1980) in the vineyard Steinmühle; we have trimmed this year’s fruit-bearing wood—canes with one to three buds, standing on an espalier of old vine-wood. This is quite a pleasant activity when it’s as warm as it is today (just under 0°C), especially when there’s no biting wind!

Weingut Kollwentz Burgenland
www.kollwentz.at