Harvest 2012 and why I loved it…

April 3, 2012

Family,Harvest 2012,South Africa,Upper-Heme-en-Aarde Valley,Wellington,Wine Making | Tags: , , — Corlea Fourie @ 11:32 am

Harvest Fastival 2012Harvest Festival 2012Bosman wineclub

As I am writing this, we are pressing one of our last three tanks of Cabernet Sauvignon in the cellar. It’s almost over: Harvest 2012.

In Wellington we have now started a blessing of the harvest ceremony which coincides with our annual harvest festival. I love the idea, but I thought I wanted to make a list of exactly what I was grateful for.

I thought it would be fitting to tell you about the 10 things that I feel blessed for this year:

1. Harvest started one week later this year than usually – It gave us one extra week of planning, mostly in the vineyard. It changed a lot for me in terms of concepts and logistics.

2. Our Optenhorst Chenin blanc vineyard had its 60th planting birthday. Oh how I love thee…

3. Our cooling system worked like a bomb, no failures, consistent cooling. What a joy.

4. ESKOM (our South African electricity public utility) supplied consistent power this harvest. No outages. High 5!

5. We employed a small team of young adults from our farm as harvest help- just to keep cleaning and help sorting. Some of them showed great aptitude and energy. Getting excited about the next generation of cellar hands for the future. I love that we can get excited about PEOPLE!

6. And on people – I feel immensely blessed that we all got through harvest intact and with no injuries. Some people forget that in making wine we work with high voltage electricity, heights, wet surfaces and a lot of happy tanks emitting CO2.

7. We had a super harvest form our grapes from the Upper Hemel-en-Aarde Valley in Hermanus. Healthy grapes from a winemaking area overlooking the ocean. High risk – but high reward.

8. On a personal level – my support team that made things work out at home. Being a winemaker in harvest time is a nerve wrecking exercise (especially if you are married to one too). Add 18 month old twins and a rosy cheeked 7 year old, and you’ve got your work cut out for you. Thanks team Fourie.

9. Coffee – good coffee. Thanks, Petrus, for the machine. I will endure any hardship with a cup of java in hand.

10. I work in a cellar where winemakers in the last century made wines without high pressure, steam, pumps, high tech presses. Thank goodness for technology and hygiene. As an obsessive compulsive type of cleaner – all we have in technology helps me feel safe and confident about our products. I sometimes go into the old cellar and look at the primitive utensils our forefathers had to work with and I feel happy…very happy.

Another year, another set of lessons learnt, I was happy with you, I fought with you. You won your fair share of battles and I mine. Harvest 2012 you beauty, we still have a long road before I put all your wines to bottle…But you have been blessed.

 

It`s not inside, its on top….But in some cases not.

March 6, 2012

Harvest 2012,Uncategorized,Upper-Heme-en-Aarde Valley | Tags: , , , — Corlea Fourie @ 3:00 pm

It seems that the De Bos farm, where we have our clonal garden, (used for our Lelienfontein Vine nursery) will always be a wealth of things we will be itching to show you. A vinous treasure trove so to speak. We took our camera with on our last grape visit, and we were not dissapointed.

Roobernet is a South African crossing of Cabernet Sauvignon and Alicante Bouschet (which also has coloured pulp). The parentage was confirmed by *ENTAV in 2007.

So here is a picture of a small Roobernet berry and the red juice it holds within. There are few people that actually make the connection that red grapes have colourless juice. That’s why my winemaker colleagues and I slave away extracting the colour from the skins in order to stain the juice to make our beloved red tipple.

So on a Bosman wiki-vine note:

“Teinturier, a French language term meaning to dye or stain, is a wine term applied to grapes whose flesh and juice is red in colour due to anthocyanin pigments accumulating within the pulp of the grape berry itself ” In short – red pulp and red juice other than most other like Cabernet, Shiraz et al which has colourless pulp and juice.

*L’Etablissement National Technique pour l’Amélioration de la Viticulture or translated: The National Technical Association for Viticultural Improvement

 

Noble rot – Harvest vineyard pic of the week…

February 21, 2012

Harvest 2012,Upper-Heme-en-Aarde Valley,Wine Making | Tags: , , , , , — Corlea Fourie @ 3:01 pm

Noble rot is the benevolent form of a grey fungus, Botrytis cinerea, affecting wine grapes. Infestation by Botrytis requires moist conditions, and if the weather stays wet, the malevolent form, “grey rot” or “suur vrot” can destroy your grapes.
Grapes become infected with Botrytis when they are ripe or almost ripe. If they are then exposed to drier conditions and become partially raisined this form of infection brought about by the partial drying process is known as noble rot. Grapes when picked at a certain point during infestation can produce particularly fine and concentrated wines.

We visited the De Bos farm in the Upper-Hemel-en-Aarde Valley yesterday, to see what we will be taking in this week from there. We saw this awesome picture in the Zinfandel vineyard – too good not to share. The infection looks like little claws getting stuck into the grape.


We do make a wine with Noble Rot character called Dolce Primitivo. It is from Primitivo grapes, but from Wellington. So after the fungus has attached to the skin, because of our dry conditions, the berries become beautifully raisin-like and concentrated. Because of the sugar content of the berries the fermentation stops naturally at some point giving rise to a wine with a lower alcohol and higher residual sugar. Through the concentration process of the noble rot – the acidity is also concentrated. The product then a wine which isn’t just sticky sweet, but also has some lovely acidity to balance it all.

The perfect ending to a meal, or a late night glass (or two) now that February`s cooler nights have set in.

 
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