The 2024 wine year – a look back
The grape harvest has been successfully brought in, our cellar is clean again and the wine is maturing in the barrels. We look back on the 2024 wine year with great gratitude and confidence – it promises to be an excellent one.
Frost in spring
We finally had another mild and wet winter.
This resulted in very early budding and regular rainfall in spring.
We then started weeding and breaking out excess shoots very early on with a larger team than usual in order to achieve optimum shoot growth and distribution.
From mid-April there was a cold snap, which led to frost damage and yield losses.
This year, however, it was not only the endangered vineyards that were affected, but also higher altitudes that were caught by the drift frost.
This was followed by moderate flowering and sometimes irregular flowering. We were relieved to see that the great effort put into the green work at the start of the vegetation period had paid off.
Rain is followed by sun
Regular rainfall until mid-July then led to an extreme advance in vegetation compared to the long-term average.
From the second half of July onwards, it became extremely hot and the growth of the vines was slowed down somewhat.
We then started very early with the green harvest (= thinning out the grapes or dividing the grapes, especially for Zweigelt) so that the vines would not suffer any drought stress. Here too, the introduction of straw in every second row in March paid off during the dry phase and we only observed minor symptoms of drought stress.
Fortunately, it then cooled down from mid-August, at least at night, and the aromas of the grapes were positively influenced and became more pronounced.
Early harvest – promising wines
Similar to 2018, we had to start harvesting the grapes as early as September 3. As the ripeness increased rapidly, haste was of the essence! We were also driven forward by the precise forecasts of exceptionally heavy rain. Before the rainy days, we already had most of the grapes in the cellar.
Finally, we finished our harvest on September 23rd after only 12 days of picking, which turned out to be significantly smaller than normal.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our hard-working reading helpers once again. It was only thanks to you and your great harvesting and selection efforts that we were able to bring such uniformly good grapes into the cellar.
The first wines are already very fine with a pleasant concentration of fruit.
We are very confident that the 2024 vintage will be above average !
