Vintage 2012 - Weeks 8 & 9

My final two weeks of vintage were for the most part uneventful as the harvest concluded and the vast majority of work was cleaning and checking the fermenting tanks. I was very generously taken out for dinner and lunch by the domestic sales manager and the owner respectively, and on both instances got to eat some lovely German food. There were a couple of dinners to celebrate the end of vintage; first with the Romanian vineyard workers and then the cellar team who are all locals. The winery also welcomed a journalist and they opened some bottles going back to 1983, all of which I had the chance to taste as well.

Bernd working hard pressing botrytised fruit to get juice with high sugar content.

Niklas compacting grape marc for future distillation to make schnapps.

Range of wines tasted going back to 1983.

Freshly and heavily hand-pruned vines in the Scharzofberg vineyard.

Old shoots clinging to the trellis wire. Always reminds me of snakes.

Just so you know who owns this vineyard.

This is Alexandra, one of the Romanian friends I made in the vineyards.

Walking up those steep slopes pruning requires a rest break.