Annegret Reh-Gartner, Reichsgraf von Kesselstatt: Harvest began Oct 4 and ended Oct 21. Average yield was 25 hl/ha. The vintage with the smallest harvest since 1976 and the shortest harvest of all time. How could that happen?
To our joy we had an early bud break and wonderful warm weather at the beginning of May. In the second half of May the weather changed and cool days and nights slowed down the vegetation considerably.
Due to the beautiful weather then again up from June we had very good and steady blossoming on Mosel, Saar and Ruwer, with a good fruit development.
The extremely hot month of July made us expect another vintage like 2003. Drought was an issue only in some young sites. Expectation for higher acidity and higher yields rose with the cool and rainy month of August. Therefore we did green harvest again in our top sites and removed a third of the leaves in the grape zone to avoid early botrytis.
Due to considerable rainfall, botrytis had developed more than expected by the end of September. With the picturesque weather in September that lasted (apart from hail on Sept 30 and bad weather on Oct 3) till the end of the harvest, the grapes shrank to raisin-like berries and the must weight rose day by day.We got a similar botrytis like 2005.
On Sept 30 we had a completely unusual and unexpected a terrible thunderstorm in the Saar. Our vineyard Scharzhofberger was hit with hail and damaged up to 85%. We therefore started harvesting immediately in order to get the good grapes that were left in as quickly as possible.
Our luck, as the available quantity of grapes got less with every day due to the steady augmentation of raisin-like berries. We decided to harvest very selectively.Partially grapes with botrytis and raisin-like berries for our Erste Lage wines with residual sugar, i e wines for eternity and partially healthy ripe grapes for our dry Grand Crus and Kabinett, i e wines with great acidity and minerality.
We have only headaches because of the very low yields of 25 hl/ha. That means 90,000 Litres from 35 hectares (less than 90 acres) – that is really too little for us. We will have shortages with our RK, the village appellations and the Kabinett wines. We hope that you will understand that some wines might have to be allocated.
We are happy and satisfied having achieved our most important goal: outstanding quality for vintage 2006.
We had planned a pre-picking at the beginning of October but the humid and warm weather with occasional rainfall in September accelerated the
ripening of the grapes and we had to quickly start the harvest.
It was important to take advantage of a small time window of 20 days with excellent weather. In seperate crates we collected grapes at different stages of ripeness – ripe, overripe and raisinlike qualities – and through this very selective hand harvest we gained excellent qualities.
The vintage 2006 has perfect sugar readings and acidity levels. 80 % of the harvest had over 100° Oechsle (25° Brix). The overall yield is 35 hl/ha
(below 2 tons/acre).
