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.
We have just passed the half-way mark for harvest 2012. Actually getting worried it will all be over too soon. So here just a quick recap op the last few weeks.
You wouldn’t be able to ask me the question above…because I do and I am biased. But luckily there are a quite a few of my kind who do love good Pinotage, and with an better understanding of the grape and the vine, a whole new generation of wine lovers will be seeing much more of these examples.
Abraham Izak Perlod was born in the Cape and schooled here in our own home town, Wellington. His life story sounds like something between Indiana Jones and Darwin. Imagine being asked by the government to go and expand the Capes range of grape varieties… After a scouting mission he brought some varieties back from overseas (a whole 177), but then he also started establishing new ones. Pinotage was borne from a crossing between Pinot noir and Cinsaut. Unlikely parent to this special local grape.
I have always felt that we have a very special connection with Pinotage here in Wellington. We have ample sunlight and a long growing season that fits Pinotage very well (not taking away that there are some awesome cool climate Pinotages out there). The vineyards that we use for the production of our Bosman Family Vineyards Pinotage, is from the farm Lelienfontein in Wellington. It is the same vineyard that is used in the production of the Wellington Wines La Cave Pinotage (a connection that we are very proud of).
We went to the vineyard on Monday to have a look at the grapes before harvest. I`ve added a video of Heinie Nel, our viticulturist, on his thoughts about the 2012 growing season in regards to the Pinotage. Will keep you updated on the harvest itself in the next post.
*Disclaimer: For more lovely news and facts on Pinotage please consult the new South Africa Pinotage Wine Guide published by the Pinotage Association and also Peter May`s book “Pinotage : Behind the Legends of South Africa`s Own Wine”
We have had a lovely breather from the hot weather of end of January. We actually had some rain on Friday evening and a really cool weekend in the cellar. We are hoping that the grapes, that have become more sugar ripe the last few weeks, will now also have the opportunity to mature in regards to crunchy pips, soft skins and grape flavour maturity.
So our weekend in pictures. The view from my cellar window: cloudy and cool – just after the night’s rain.
While we were pressing, some of Elsenburg Agricultural college’s students came by for a tasting. Happy to report an enthusiastic and eager group. I wish them well with their viticulture and oenology studies for this coming year. May you learn that in wine, one never ceases to learn!
Sunday morning saw the drawing off of some lovely clear juice to start fermenting our Chardonnay from our De Bos farm in the Upper Hemel –en –Aarde Valley. The grapes are from high density bush vines surrounded by fynbos and some of the most beautiful surroundings known to the wine world. Hoping we will do the area justice with the wine we are pampering.
Yesterday, late evening, I went to see her. I knew it would be sunny earlier on, and she would maybe not want to see me before – she`s flashy that way. I took my daughter with because Nelleke loves listening to new stories and being shown around.
As I sat in her company I knew that she looked so much younger than her years, everything about her so well kept and groomed. She has some signs of the times, but put her on the cover of a glossy mag, and she`ll turn heads for sure.
By her well-formed legs I can see that she loves dancing in the wind – you know, those fancy steps when no one is watching.
Where you come from is key, your roots, she told me… I heard she was born, and grew up here in Wellington. She told me her age. “Sixty this year – you know, it’s the new forty!” I believe her.
Her name is Optenhorst. Vineyard C1, according to our Wine and Spirits Board. She`s single (as in single vineyard unit) and by research done by the Chenin Blanc Association and also by Rosa Kruger, she is one of the oldest.
She`s a striking lady, and I feel honoured to know her…
We have had one awesome week in harvesting grapes. As mentioned in the previous post, we started off with a cooler, overcast, week. I think this was what the vineyards were waiting for to show its true colours and flavours. The Chenin blanc came in extremely pretty. See Jan Bosman sampling these grapes on his morning walk with George, the rescue Basset hound. News from the Bosman kitchen says that Jan enjoyed the grapes so much that he skipped breakfast.
Getting to the subject of this post, see the pictures below to see the pressed juice and then the settled juice. One of the most visual processes in the cellar. Love it.
When the grapes are pressed it results in the lovely green, cloudy juice. After settling over 48hours we are left with the beautiful clear juice. I will be adding yeast later today – and then we are singing.
This brings me to the video clip you can see on YouTube. It shows our MCC Steen 2012 in the making, fermenting away. This in turn is one of the most audible signs that harvest is in full swing.
Looking back in my notes for 2011, by today – last year, we had taken in our Chardonnay vineyards and the first bit of Chenin blanc for our Adama White blend. This year I have only taken in one barrel worth of old bushvine Chenin without irrigation, which in the heat wave two weeks ago, wouldn’t have made it. And then also the Chenin blanc for our base wine.
This is the view from my office this morning: Cloudy and overcast, but a bit humid.
So we’ve been to the vineyards and what an exciting morning! The Chenin Blanc looks lovely (sun kissed, freckled, sweet but with a lovely level of tartness). See the picture below. I can only imagine what it’s going to look like in the press.
And then for the highlight of the morning – Pinotage testing! The vineyard in question is the same one used by Wellington Wines for their La Cave Pinotage – a wine that has earned them a spot in the inaugural Top 20 Pinotage Classification. It is also the vineyard from where the grapes came for our Top100SAWines lauded Pinotage 2009 and the Cape blend “Erfenis” 2010.
I learnt something new about our viticulturist today. Except for his acute fine eye for detail – he does not like snakes. He spotted the skin of an enormous snake between the rows in our Pinotage vineyard. Luckily at that point we had made up our minds about the grapes. Here is a picture of a part of its tail that fell off when I picked it up. Nice to know our vineyards are bustling with the sounds and the signs of nature.
Today was a great breather from the warmer weather we have been experiencing the last few days. We were very interested to see what the heat`s influence was on our grape`s analysis so this morning we started sampling and testing!
In the photo below, we are testing our Chenin Blanc from a vineyard called Driehoek (or Triangle vineyard). Some of the plantings in this vineyard date back to 1963 and 1979, which makes it quite humbling (note the winemaker and viticulturist not even being a twinkle in our parent’s eyes in those years).
As said in the previous post we had experienced some cloudy weather during flowering, so to make sure that we get samples that paints the best possible clear picture – we are using bunch samples this year.
Results on this vineyard show that we did not have a significantly higher rise in sugar in the last few days, but we did lose a small bit of valuable acidity. Still have a few days before these grapes do come in. In the meanwhile, we will be dreaming of the lovely granny smith and honeysuckle notes released from these little berries. Bliss…
A harvest is made not only in the weeks before picking but starts in the preceding winter. We had a very good winter season, except for the below average rain precipitation. Good, even bud break followed and flowering this year was in cool, sometimes cloudy conditions. We were fortunate that there were no storms and wind damage in flowering which sometimes can be quite severe. The cool weather we experienced in November and December was ideal. January onwards has brought some interesting conditions with temperatures rising above 35oC. This will definitely speed up the ripening process that we have thought, before the heat, will put harvest back some two weeks.
All in all we are still very impressed by good growth and bunches with small berries. The adaptability of the noble vine gives us hope that this harvest will still be of good quality. Its success will depend, in part also, on the decisions we make in regards to water management and the timing of harvesting.
Viticulturist Heinie Nel, Assistant Charlene Ferreira, Hospitality Manager Tina Steenkamp and Operations boffin Martin November raise a glass on Harvest 2012
We were privileged to have Peter May come visit us on his recent trip to the Cape winelands. For those of you who do not know Peter, he is the founder of The Pinotage Club, an international cyber-based fan club for wines made from the Pinotage variety. Peter was awarded Honorary Membership of the producers Pinotage Association in 2004 and was a judge at the annual Pinotage Top 10 Competition in 2004 and 2005. Peter is a wine writer, educator and author. His book PINOTAGE: Behind the Legends of South Africa’s Own Wine has just been published.
A lot has happened since his first visit in 2007 when we were busy with our maiden vintage. Since then we have caught up in London and now again at our Lelienfontein cellar.
Read his post in his popular blog -The Pinotage club, here.
The Pinotage 2009 will only be released at our annual Release weekend in September later this year, but as in the past, we have a reservation list.
Thank you Peter for your comments and that you are spreading the word about a truly amazing grape variety.
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