From vineyard to cellar December 2013

Indeed, not even three full weeks, when I look back on it. Everything was quite extraordinary. We - and our grapes - were bombarded with vast amounts of rain. As the inches of rainfall kept rising, I stopped counting. It was simply too much. It was also warm. I sometimes had the feeling that I could hear the grapes fizzling...fizzling...in the sense of rotting away. Relatively soon, though, it became clear that my anxiety, neuroses, and fears were fairly unfounded. Of course there was rot - everywhere - but it wasn't as dramatic as it could have been...as it had been in 2006, for example. On the contrary, even musts from rot-infested vineyards tasted quite good. Intense, aromatic, and concentrated. Naturally, I'm not singing the praises of botrytis simply because it occurred in 2013. Nor am I trying to make light of the matter. Yet, as a phrasemaker would say: the final score is only tallied at the end. The prognosis is not all that bad. Vintage 2013 could prove to be better than expected. Not everywhere and not necessarily - but the potential is there.

 

 

Those who followed online social media during the harvest know that reports varied considerably. For my part, I can only talk about Riesling, and here, there were clearly two camps in 2013: those who picked relatively early and those who waited for quite some time. It was difficult to decide when to start picking Riesling because we could quickly see rot approaching and with it, a reduction in quantity. A logical response would be to act along the lines of "better safe than sorry" and "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," whereby neither must weight nor high acidity nor even aroma play a role. Try to proceed as sensibly as possible: process the crop skillfully and in the end, it too will yield wine. Following this game plan certainly ensured economically viable yields, and made chaptalization and double-salt deacidification inevitable. All of which is perfectly OK. It simply boils down to a question of philosophy and economic efficiency.

 

 

The "other" camp harvested much later and as a result, suffered considerable crop loss. Hardly any of these growers could have harvested much more than 50 hl/ha. Such a small quantity leaves an ordinary grower facing a great financial challenge and scarcely able to make reasonable calculations. If some felt penalized by having risked the delay, the musts and first young wines have compensated for that. Yet, in the end, they too will only yield wine. The big question remains: how will things taste later? I don't know, but I hope so. To me, it makes no sense to speculate about the value of the one or the other philosophy. We each have to do what we think is appropriate and correct. Having said that, that's all there is to say.