Wine Knowledge
Wine chat: unfiltered, straight from real life. With both feet deep in the Palatinate soil, hands sticky with grape juice, a head full of ideas and a heart full to the brim, just like the glasses.
This is not a textbook.
This is not a wine guide.
This is a piece of Palatinate winemaking life.
Welcome to the Palatinate.
Welcome to tradition & modernity.
Welcome to WeinGeplauder.
Now that it is slowly getting warmer again, the discussion is reviving about how warm or cold a wine should be to fully develop its aroma. The answer could easily come from a lawyer, because it is:
It depends.
What?
Unlike in tropical countries, our plant world is adapted to the four seasons... and we, who live in the rhythm of nature, therefore have completely different tasks in each season. Today we want to talk about the art of pruning . If we follow the traditional order of winter, spring, summer, autumn, pruning is the first step that leads to the new harvest... and this step is a tough one!
We wait to prune the vines until the leaves have completely fallen off. Sometimes this happens as early as November, sometimes in December, definitely in January. Then we tackle the old wood...
NOW it's finally here: the long-awaited moment when the harvest begins! We can hardly wait to harvest the first grapes of the 2023 vintage. If you want to experience this magical time, you can swap your office desk for the field and work for a day or three weeks (and everything in between!). Only those who have ever been covered in grape juice from head to toe know how precious a glass of wine really is.
You want to know what you are getting yourself into?
Being in the right place at the right time ... so much depends on that. Entire destinies have developed differently than planned because you were in the right place at the right time. For us winemakers, such a decisive moment comes every year: when we decide when the harvest season begins.
But when is the ideal time to start harvesting grapes?
Very simple: when the grape is ripe.
And when is it ripe?
That's where it gets more difficult.
