Weingut · Honestly speaking
Faults
Most wineries have a page with awards. So do we. This is the other one.
Going organic wasn't a switch you flip. It was a series of years in which something went wrong and we learnt from it. Sometimes voluntarily.
In the vineyard
What we spray and how we prune.
The batch that triggered it allTwo hectares, one question
In 2014 we were still farming conventionally. A contaminated batch of a fungicide killed off the shoot tips on around two hectares. Growth: stopped. Yield: lost. The manufacturer compensated for the damage. What remained was the question: what are we actually spraying? Our answer was to convert to organic.
TodayWhat we applyThe best advert for organic came from a fungicide manufacturer.
The baking sodaThe first organic year
In the first organic year, the classic mix: sulphur, copper, orange oil and potassium bicarbonate, basically baking soda. That kept the fungi under control. Not the leaves: the combination was simply too harsh for the Thermenregion.
Natural doesn't mean gentle. After one year, the baking soda was out again.
TodayWhy we only spray in the eveningThe low-wound pruning methodThree years of theory
Great on paper, and we still stand behind it today. It took me three or four years to really understand the system. But you can't prune 25 hectares alone. And what you can barely explain yourself, you can't teach anyone.
A method that only works if one person can do it doesn't work.
TodayWhy we are changing our pruning methodPlant protectionEvery year anew
Eleven organic years, eleven different spray schedules. In none of them did everything fit. Sometimes the nutrition, sometimes the timing, sometimes a product that did more harm than good.
Strictly speaking, every single year belongs on this page. That’s exactly why we’re good at it today.
TodayForecasting instead of routine
With the machinery
Equipment that couldn't do what it was meant to.
The old sprayerThe first organic years
Organic products don't penetrate the leaf, they sit on top of it. So coverage decides everything. And for the first few years we drove an ancient sprayer that couldn't do exactly that.
TodayThe sprayerWe changed the product and the timing. The machine came last.
The first tunnel sprayerGood at first, then too expensive
After the old sprayer, it was our first investment. The spray pattern was good, coverage was a good deal better and it gave us much better control of organic growing. The double tunnel sprayer we use today is a different machine.
Not a mistake at first. Too expensive in hindsight.
TodayThe sprayerThe destemmer that cracked the seedsOnly noticed late
Our destemmer worked with a classic drum and went about it roughly. It cracked open some of the seeds. What passes from a cracked seed into the wine, nobody wants in there.
Replaced by a machine that plucks the berries instead of threshing them. Could have been noticed earlier.
TodayBefore fermentationThe summer without coolingA cold room, but no mash cooling
A very hot year and all we had was the cold room. Grapes came in at 25 to 30 degrees. You can't bring that down fast enough in a room. The musts started to ferment, the carbon dioxide stirred up the sediment and the wine never turned clear again.
Since 2019, a tubular heat exchanger has cooled the crushed grapes directly to below 15 degrees. This lets us cool down warm grapes quickly too.
TodayBefore fermentation
In the cellar
Yeast, fermentation and the closure.
The CorkMore than ten years of side-by-side tests
From 2003, for more than ten years, we bottled the same batch twice, half under cork, half under screw cap, then tasted them blind against each other. The screw cap won in about 95 out of 100 cases. We kept using cork anyway: for red wine until 2021, for natural wine until 2023.
We had the answer for twenty years. We only believed it much later.
The aroma yeastsAgain and again, over the years
More aroma, more fruit: the temptation was the same every time. So we tried it. Fermentation ran less smoothly, problems arose that hadn't existed before. And what ended up in the glass tasted of the yeast instead of the vineyard.
After that, back to neutral yeast. And a few years later, from the start again. That's the mistake we made most often.
TodayThe yeast that travels through the whole cellarThe whole berriesFour or five years, then dropped
For red wine, let every berry start fermenting on its own, no pump, just gravity into the tank. That worked so well for a few years that we stopped paying attention. Then residual sugar was left after pressing. Too little to taste, enough to tip things the wrong way in the barrique. Result: more volatile acidity.
The mistake wasn't the attempt itself, but that at some point we considered it done.
TodayRed wine
We publish the list because a business that shows no mistakes is only hiding them better.