Seidelberg

In every new year lays new opportunities, new challenges, new ways and a little bit of uncertainty. Even in the 21st century with all the technology that we own, knowledge that we taught ourselves through books, skills accomplished by practical action as well as experiences told to us by elders or even by mistakes, will we always face a new and different vintage. Too big are the influences of Mother Nature in our beautiful African country, like anywhere else, too complex is the game of the trio (Indian- and Atlantic Ocean, sun and rain, soil and vineyard) to plan accurately the upcoming harvest. In the end only time will tell.

The weather conditions (2009 - 2010) were extremely exciting for our team, especially for our viticulturist. As I mention in one of my previous blog, we had a quite cold start into the season. The rain didn’t become luckily a major problem but we had over the last few weeks some unpredictable heat waves. In the result of this we have a far less production per hectare as expected. But in terms of the quality we will face, as we like to say down here at the southern hemisphere, a “lekker” harvest, fortunately because of a very simple fact, the interaction of quantity and quality. This rule dictates that the quality of the wine increases as the yield decreases. Sure, with a higher amount of grapes you can make more money, if the market demand is high enough for this product category, then volume production can be profitable. But to be constantly successful and for the good will of the company’s reputation, high quality is a very valued fact, that can’t be denied. To make a long story short, we will have around ~15% less tones this year, which is not always bad.

At the 22nd of January 2010 the show down finally started. Early in the morning, around 5 am, we harvested the first part of the !?! … Sauvignon Blanc block!

The reason why I paused is, our red African cultivar, the Pinotage, belongs as well to the group of the “early ripening”. So it depends on the year who is going to be the winner of the vintage. The day was really perfect to harvest. Just the day before we noticed a temperature around 32°C, but this particular Friday morning we experienced a cold front with some very nice cool winds from the mighty Ocean. It kept the sugar and acid balance constant, which is very important for the following wine process in the cellar. Our date to pick the berries was well chosen for this year, thanks to some good interacting between Ian de Lange (Viticulturist) and Alicia Rechner (winemaker). The daily walk through every specific vineyard, we have 105 ha in total, to the check the quality of the berries, sugar and acid content, ripeness as well as aroma structure need to be perfect, is definitely not that easy to control as it sounds. Anyway, this morning it promised to be a good harvest with some good wines, with delicate crispiness on the palate and fruit aromas on the nose.

Alicia and I chat about the right time to pick the berries. While she mentioned that to ensure constant quality, you need to have consistent requirements and that’s all what we “want”, curiously the words of a well known band “You can’t always get what you want, but you can try […]” sounded through the radio at this particular moment. Coincidently we got our grapes in with exactly the same sugar and acid content on exactly the same date! Yep, consistency here we come. That’s certainly one of these moments in life and just amazing.

We usually pick our Sauvignon Blanc grapes in two different steps. We first harvest a certain amount of the vineyard, which is in general the majority of the production and then a few days later we finish off with the rest of the block. We ferment both samples completely separately from each other and only afterwards we blend them together again. All aromas of the wine need to be a harmonic interaction which will influence the taste of the wine enormously. In very cool climate zones wines of a single cultivar creates great complexity; in warmer climate zones, in one hand it ensure for more consistency in terms of growth and ripeness, on the other hand it is typical to blend different block assemblages together. The sum means complexity and complexity means quality, that’s just a matter of fact.

Well this is just the beginning of the harvest 2010. Let’s see what challenges and interesting times are ahead. Hopefully time will ensured that all the currently pretty good components of the berries will be integrated and complement one another to release a high quality wine, not for the sake of us but YOU,  old as well as new friends of Seidelberg.