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The harvest team, March 2008
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Bein Merlot 2008 |
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| The young Bein Merlot 2008 is still in barrel, but it promises a lot - a combination of succulent fruit and sweet barrel flavours, oppulent on the palate, with a good natural balance and wonderful soft tannins. Let's hope for the best! | ||
| VINTAGE REPORT 2007/08 |
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February 2009 Now already 11 months in barrel, the 2008 vintage developed to a wonderful wine - it shows lots of fruit of sweet dark berries, underlayered with toasty mocha and chocolate flavours from the barrels. Especially the wine deriving from the central part of our vineyard is very promising, and takes my special allocation of lots of new oak with ease. March-May 2008 As predicted, the harvest started late this year, and the first bunch was picked on Easter Monday only. The fruit was evenly ripe, and we planned to get it in within four days, filling one tank on every day. But this Easter Monday we didn't get far, too nice was the day - only about 1/3 of what we had planned! Nevertheless, three days later the grapes were in the cellar, and everybody got a big bowl of Potjiekos and was happy. In February, we had again aerial photographs made from our vineyard in the near infrared spectrum. This allows us to judge the physiological state of our vines and consequently to subdivide our vineyard into different batches according their vigour, which can then be individually managed. This is a great help in obtaining evenly ripe fruit, since every batch can be ripened to their individual optimal ripeness, and eventually harvested and vinified separately. It is our best harvest so far, quality wise. We never had such good fruit with such thick-skinned berries, intense aromas, dark blue colour and crispy ripe tannins. The resulting wine is like black enamel, and we hope the wine will deliver its promise. Fermentation with different yeast strains went through without any problems, and the wines mature now for 12 month in the barrels. Again we made some lovely Pink Merlot this year, which will be ready for our South African customers by end of May. The same applies for the Little Merlot 2007, which has developed into an excellent wine, full of juicy fruit and good mouth fill. Both wines were bottled on the 8th of May 08. January 2008 November 2007 But the
highlight of the season was the pair of Dikkops that chose our
vineyard as breeding ground, and they successfully raised a chick.
They are beautiful birds with stunning bright yellow eyes (see
picture above), and we value this as reward for our efforts for a
sustainable viticulture, as close to nature as possible. September/October
2007 April -
August 2007: a particularly long, cold and wet winter
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Spotted Dikkop Burhinus
capensis
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