Ried Roterd 2018

Site & soil

Ried Roterd lies mid-slope on the Spitzerberg. The upper part of the site shows the limestone soil in its very meagre stony form, while the foot of the vineyard Roterd is interfused with elements of clay, which have a better capacity for storing water. Thus, the wines from Ried Roterd are always a bit fuller in body and more accessible than those harvested from higher elevations.

Back in the 1920s, Katharina Muhr owned a small parcel of vines (0.17 ha) in Ried Roterd. Piece by piece, Dorli Muhr has purchased & leased land around this plot. She has converted the old vines to organic viticulture and planted fallow land anew, so that she now cultivates a total of 3.3 hectares in this site, most of which are planted to Blaufränkisch.

Harvest & vinification

The grapes are harvested by hand, and any overripe berry is removed by hand. In the cellar, the grapes are lightly crushed and macerated – in part with the stems – in open fermentation vats. This extraction is very gentle and accomplished entirely without pumping, and fermentation begins after a few days thanks to the wild yeasts. The spontaneous fermentation proceeds very slowly and at room temperature; the must is neither heated nor cooled. This guarantees wines that are very precise & generously aromatic. After about twenty days, the wine is pressed and then matured in 1000-litre wooden casks. No new wood is utilised, in order to avoid masking the expressive fruit of the Blaufränkisch. During the approximately twenty months of maturation, the wine is racked only once and ultimately bottled without filtration.

Vintage 2018

2018 was a year of extremes: very fast flowering, then a cooler period with some rains until end of June. Followed by a very dry and very hot summer. We had to cut off grapes from young vines to prevent them from dying. The old vines with their deep roots, though, were less impressed by the heat. Begin of september, just before harvest, we had big rains which caused some problems in flat vineyards. But on the stony and dry vineyards on the higher Spitzerberg, those rains even were beneficial, as they reduced the stress and helped to soften the tannins.

The result is a beautiful complex and dense wine which is at the same time refreshing, cheerful and light-footed. An ideal expression of limestone terroir.