| This year, your wish to finish work before Christmas was greater than our longing for a hypothetical ice wine in January. Initially, it was quite tempting: there was hardly any botrytis, the taste of the Muskateller grapes was no longer up front but developed cinnamon-like aromas with a hint of tea rose. In view of these developments, however, we decided to use these grapes for a December harvest.
This concludes the harvest 2008. After a difficult summer it was a very satisfactory harvest, yielding straight, fresh wines with finesse, not too heavy, with beautiful acidity (also very good for sparkling wine) and a good chance of aging these wines for ten or twenty years. Here at the winery we love wines such as these.
Nothing counts more than preserving the unique expression of each vintage.
Some of the most beautiful moments this year were: the wild freshness of the grapes for the sekt base wine (with hints of wild cherry for the Zweigelt rosé), the healthiness of the classic Veltliner and Riesling grapes, the light but seductive Pinots which we were able to harvest despite the difficult summer and the mighty, almost overripe grapes from the Käferberg, Heiligenstein and Lamm vineyards, harvested in November, after they had sweated out all excess moisture.
The harvest was long and drawn out, and the same will be true for vinification and bottling of our wines. Beginning with the Grüner Veltliner L+T and then progressing to the classic vineyards Berg-Vogelsang, Loiser Berg, Steinmassel and later to the reserve wines, we will not finish bottling all our wines before September.
Early bottling underscores freshness and direct fruit, the later ones, take substance and character from the yeast and become longer, more complex, and more long lived.
Willi and Edwige Bündlmayer
Langenlois, 18 December, 2008 |
