Cuvée vom Berg 2016

Site & soil

Due to erosion over the course of many decades, lower-lying areas in each vineyard have thicker layers of soil than the rest.  In very dry years, the lower part has better water nutrition and therefore the grapes mature more evenly and fully than in the significantly more meagre soils higher up. In years with a wet autumn, grapes in these lower parts ripen later and quite differently from the rest.

Every year, we separate the grapes from the lower parcels of each vineyard and blend them together. We call this wine Cuvée vom Berg, as it is really a blend made from almost all vineyards and varieties, although with a prominent proportion of Syrah and Blaufränkisch.

Harvest & vinification

As with all our wines, we don’t use sulphur on the grapes, we ferment with wild yeasts and we macerate very softly in large wooden fermenters without using any mechanical tools. Grapes and must are neither heated nor cooled. During the wine’s two years of maturation, we make only one soutirage – for the rest of the time, the wine just matures slowly.

The result is an impressive wine, very seductive with fruit, finesse and tempting acidity. It is a wine that sommeliers love to serve by the glass, as it evolves and improves the longer the bottle is open.

Vintage 2016

Finally, some water!, the vines sighed, because during the summer of 2016 we had some nice little bits of rainfall now and then, which helped the vines to relax after the stressful dry and extremely hot year 2015.  For our work in the vineyards, the rain sometimes offered complications. Even greater, since 2016 was our first year of working with organic treatments! But the vines and the grapes really enjoyed the water. Maturing was slow but very steady, the sugar content grew very slowly and stayed moderate, so that we could wait with the harvest until the second half of September and profit from a full aromatic maturation. The acidity was very fine and elegant, the grapes were healthy, nicely balanced and showed a very relaxed sense of flavour.