A very special harvest

When we returned from our little family vacation the 3rd week of August I thought we’d still have plenty of time until the rush begins. The first visitors arrived. It was a perfect summer week and dinner feasts were still taking place in the yard. It was a pleasure having our dear friend Sabine around during harvest to take care… Read more →

Winds of change

It’s spring. The most classic spring we’ve experienced in years. Some warm days, some chilly days, a little bit of rain here and there and a touch of frost a few times. The vineyards look beautiful. We had a good bud break, only a little bit of frost damage here and there and the greening looks beautifully diverse. A fun… Read more →

The blitz harvest of 2018

Originally Melanie and I had planned to do a chilled trip all the way through Italy this August. But an early bud break followed by summer all way long made us reduce the road-trip to a couple of days of camping in the Bavarian woods. When we came back there was just enough time to welcome Miryam from Spain and… Read more →

July vineyard update: summertime

Rarely can anybody remember such a long summer as we’ve been (and still are) experiencing it this year. We had to start early in the morning many days to finish the fine-tuning in the vineyards, the afternoons were mostly too hot to work outside. Good that we had a fair amount of work left to do in the cellar. Wines… Read more →

June vineyard update: with full force

It’s been a remarkable season so far. We’ve been experiencing serious summer weather for weeks now with decent amounts of rain every now and then. There are no better growing conditions. The vineyards are three weeks (!) before the average schedule and we’re expecting harvest to kick in late August. Most vineyards carry a lot of grapes, big grapes. We… Read more →

Planting the past for the future

After two weeks passed we finally finished planting our mix of 17 varieties (“Alter Fränkischer Satz”). A few hundred years back this used to be the standard way of planting a vineyard. A mix of varieties increases the diversity and decreases the chance of a bad harvest – if two varieties perform badly there are still 15 left. Melanie and… Read more →

New wines for spring

While our new spring crew is polishing its disgorging skills I finally do find the time to write a few lines about what happened the last weeks. First of all we bottled plenty of wine back in March. The new 2017 Fledermaus is in brilliant shape and currently getting packed on pallets so you can enjoy it as soon as… Read more →

Waiting for spring

The end of February comes with the sun rising considerably earlier each day. A dark and extraordinarily wet winter is coming to an end with a grand final: we’re expecting temperatures below -10°C (14°F) for a couple of nights next week. Generally this is not a problem. But for this kind of mini bulldozer I wanted to move some soil… Read more →