Vintage Blog
Observe us in Vineyard and Cellar, and follow the origin of the new
Bein Merlot:
Vintage 2011-2012
31.12.2011: Happy New Year!
December 2011: Stellenbosch is busy
Still lots of work in the vineyard like the previous month, but also
visitors are streaming back into the winelands. A special attraction was
the 2nd "Summer in Stellenbosch Valley Festival",
where the Bein's presented their Merlots in a tasty combination with
Swiss delicacies. Get an impression from the event with the following video:
November 2011 keeps us busy in the vineyard
It's still unusually dry, but the growing vines keep us busy with shoot positioning over and over, leaf plugging, tipping and toping and finally bunch trimming. Have a look at the video how this works:
September 2011:
Although we had only little rain quantity wise, begin of September was characterised by unfriendly wet-cold weather. This changed to sunny by mid September, and we could finish the short-pruning by September 15 in beautiful weather, which stayed on for the rest of the month. This however means again a dry start into the season!
August 2011: Rain at last
August finally brought us some rain, and the main dams are filled to 70%
of their capacity. The vineyard is still dormant, and the final
short-pruning to two buds is planned for mid September.
Also good news from the owl box: Four chicks are hatched, and the
parents are taking good care of them - watch them on our video Owl Blog (inset left).
July 2011: Cold and dry!
It is cold, very cold. But also dry, very dry! Up to now, we had not
even half the rain as usual during this time of the year. But thanks
to sufficient precipitation in the previous winter, the dams are still comparably
full.
Contrary to popular belief, winter brings lots of work, in the vineyard
with pruning and maintenance work, in the
cellar with racking, blending a.o.m.
Also the donkeys want to be kept busy, since there are not many tourist
for their entertainment. So we restored an
old Cape donkey cart and will put them to work...we'll keep you posted in case we succeed :-))
Winter is also flowering time, with flowers all over in the most
wonderful colours. Also the birds get ready for the new season with a
beautiful new plumage. And at last, our barn owls started breeding. On
July 21, they laid their first egg. Watch our video clips about them in our
Owl Blog on the left!
June 2011: Bottling, labelling and packing again and again
At last, winter has arrived, and we are banned into the cellar - being fully busy with bottling, labelling and packing all the new wines. This is always a logistic nightmare, until everything is correctly calculated, designed, ordered, supervised, checked and counter-checked, and eventually packed away - it's this time of the year where the cellar is full to the rim, with three harvests and all the dry good under one roof! But in the end, everything is bottled, packed and put away, some of it already shipped for export. At last, we can cuddle up behind the warm Kachel and enjoy a book (my current sleeper: The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony).
May 4, 2011: Post harvest thoughts...
Currently, the new wine is peacefully maturing in the barrels, having
quickly gone through malolactic fermentation. We really love this wine, with its
deep-purple colour and its already surprisingly chalky-smooth tannins.
It appears that this is again another superb vintage in terms of
quality. I know, I know we said this already for the last three
vintages! But it really seems that our vineyard wants to get better and
better every year, trying to outperform any already excellent previous
vintages.
After all, everybody can judge for himself: The highly appraised
Bein Merlot 2008 is still available, though almost sold out, as is the
Little Merlot 2009, while the flagship Merlot 2009 is soon ready for
release. And right today, we are bottling the Little Merlot 2010, which
will soon become available, an excellent herald of what we can
expect from this excellent vintage 2010!
March 19-21, 2011: HARVEST
This year again, the climate of our cool, south facing slope allowed our
grapes extra hang time for super maturity, without becoming cooked or
even raisined. But eventually, we harvested - actually on Human Rights
Day - just in time before the announced first autumn rains. After all,
the ripening season was ideal with plenty of sun but no heat waves and
pleasantly cool nights during March, ideal for good colour and flavour
development. On top, the continuously dry conditions brought about
small berries with a correspondingly higher skin/juice ratio, promising
particularly concentrated and strong wines.
The sugars, however, were as well high with 25 Ballings (% sugar),
though supported by a favourable natural acidity with a pH of 3,6. After a
short cold-soaking over 3-4 days, the resulting musts were fermented at
moderate temperatures of 25-28°C to dryness, after which the young
wines went directly into barrels for malolactic
fermentation.
March 2, 2011 : Harvest of the grapes for our Rosé
Up to now, we had an excellent ripening time, with lots of sunshine but
no real heart waves and no rain at all - ideal ripening conditions
provided you have same extra water! Thanks to our supplementary
irrigation, without which we admittedly would have struggled to get our
vines through the dry season, we achieved an even and healthy ripening,
and the crop for our Rose could be harvested on the exactly same day
like last year, on the 2nd of March.
As described on our webpage about the vineyard, we subdivide our
vineyard into smaller subterroirs according their growth pattern,
identified by means of aerial infrared imagery. This allows us to
harvest the grapes for the different wines according to their individual
needs. The Rose comes e.g. from the more vigorous parts and is harvested
earlier for fresher flavours and livelier acidity levels. In the case of
the rosé, the grapes are then processed like a white wine, i.e. the
juice is pressed off after a short maceration overnight and cold fermented to
preserve the delicate fruity aromas.
January 2011: Still warm and dry!
Some tiny showers on New Year's Day brought little relief, and
the year went on as before: warm and dry, vey dry! On the other hand, the
beautiful weather combined with the blessings of our supplementary
irrigation promotes an ideal and above all very healthy fruit
development.
In accordance with the slightly later bud break, also colour
change was more than a week later and only completed by late January. As
every year, we used this phase to eliminate late-maturing fruit parts, a
task which we could tackle generously since there is bountiful fruit. And again, we
protected the most exposed parts of
our vineyard in proximity of trees and bushes with bird nettings, to keep those unwelcomed freeloaders out. Now we can look forward
to a good harvest, which we expect towards end of March - cross fingers
that
the weather holds, by then!
December 2010: warm and dry!
After an already dry winter, the first three months of the season didn't bring much rain either. And that nice rain everywhere else in the Cape just before Christmas, unfortunately hasn't reach our corner. It's now getting seriously dry, so we are glad to have our supplementary irrigation system. On the other hand, we have been blessed with warm but moderate temperatures and very little wind, and the fruit is developing well and evenly. It looks as if we can tackle the 2011 with much optimism for a good harvest.
November 2010: Flowering
Moderate temperatures with little wind and minimal rain created ideal
conditions for an undisturbed flowering and good fruit development. And
any late developers, due to the somewhat uneven budding at the
beginning of the season, can now be eliminated generously.
This November brought also a novelty of a different kind. As our regular
visitors might know, we periodically analyze our vineyard by means of
aerial infrared imagery for vigour differences, which helps us to
subdivide our vineyard into smaller micro-terroirs for a more precise
management (for more info, see our poster on
Precision Viticulture).
This year, we used an even more advanced technology. Here, the infrared
sensors were attached to the tractor and thus scanned every single vine
by passing through the rows. Since the obtained data are correlated with
their GPS coordinates, we can then create on the computer a colour map,
indicating the zones of varying physiological activities within our
vineyard.
This new technique, which is offered by a young company from Beaune in
Burgundy ( www.viti-yojik.com ),
promises a significant quality improvement over the arial remote sensing
- we hope this will be found in the wine, too!
October 2010: Spring time!
| Lots of work in the vineyard now with suckering, stem cleaning and watching out for fungal diseases. In the meantime, the barn owls claimed their nest box back, so we put up a second box - and installed a camcorder in both! Check out this sample on the right with the barn owls, I could watch it for hours! |
September 2010: dryer than expected!/h5>
September was abnormally dry. Though the dams are filled to capacity, the vines start the season on dry soils, an unusual situation at this time of the year! This means less vigour to start with, but possibly problems during the ripening season, since the soil water reserves should substantially help to overcome the dry summer months
August 2010 : Pruning Time
A
rather chilly August, though comparably little rain were comfy
conditions for our pruning work. Like every year, we selected in a first
flight the canes for the future bearers, which were then short-pruned in
one day, on the 8th of September, in order to achieve even budding. This
was cautiously observed by a new visitor: a pair of Rock Kestrels has
moved into the owl box under the roof of our winery, where barn owls
raised successfully 3 chicks last year.
Plastic blight in Stellenbosch
June 2010: A
new disease has struck Stellenbosch’s vineyards, the plastic blight! It
slowly crept in, but strikes now with vehemence in the most valuable areas. We talk about the
hothouse industry, which puts up their ugly plastic tunnels everywhere,
regardless of the damage they cause to environment and landscape.
Unapologetically, they profit from legislative and executive weaknesses
of the responsible authorities, to the detriment of local wine farms and
tourism. Click on the picture to the right and see, how our beautiful
area has changed in the last few weeks!
But we will fight this development. Have a look at the
Polkadraai Hills website, where you can also comment on this matter
– it will help us getting the authorities move in the right direction!
May 4, 2010: Finally Rain!
Finally, it rains! 36 mm on this day, a sigh of relieve, and the
vines take a last long sip before winter sleep!
But Winter in the Cape means also flowering time
for the indigenous flora,
which is initiated by the autumn rains. The rich abundance of the natural
winter flora is stunning in South Africa, starting with the wild Callas and Watsonias
everywhere, the many diverse Proteas, all the quaint succulent flowers,
and of course the huge variety of daisies and other flowers covering the
veldt in Spring like an ornate Persian carpet. The same applies to our
indigenous garden, which attracts many beautiful birds with its
colourful flowers.
April 2010: bottling time
Since we harvested on March 23-25, we are longing for the urgently needed autumn rains. For the vines, it was an exhaustingly long and dry ripening season, and it seems that autumn will go on like this, holding back the rain as long as possible.
In the mean time, we racked the Merlot
2009 out of barrel, blended it as described in our
vintage report 2009, and bottled it by
mid of April.
Since
last year, we changed over to hand-bottling in a move to improve quality
control over this last important step in the production of our Bein
Merlot. Accordingly small but nifty is our new bottling equipment, with
a 4-head filler and a semiautomatic corking machine, imported from
Italy.
The Bein Merlot 2009 will now mature quietly for another
year in our bottle maturation store, while the Little Merlot 2009 will
soon be labelled for an early release.
Weather-wise it's getting cooler, with night temperatures in the single
digits. The garden looks dry and is
longing for rain.
March 2010: Harvest time
Harvest started on the 2 of March, because, as a novelty, we decided to harvest this year our more vigorously growing blocks (defined by Precision Viticulture) two weeks earlier in order to vinify it as Rosé only. This allows us to exclude this traditionally lesser quality from our main crop, and more over to match harvest timing according the requirements of the rosé, i.e. at lower alcohol, fresher flavours and crispier acidity.
Harvest of the grapes for Bein Merlot 2010 started eventually on March 23. Rain was announced, so we hurried to get everything in within three days, but it stayed dry as before. Moreover, the crop was significantly smaller than expected, but - it must be said - of excellent quality: smaller bunches with smaller berries, thicker skins, tougher pulp, and accordingly less juice! As become known later-on, the harvest was down in the entire area of Stellenbosch and the surrounding wards, mainly due to the influence of wind and weather, in some cases also due to losses caused by downy mildew.
Previous reports have been condensed to vintage reports for each year and can be looked up there!