Cellar

Before fermentation

95 per cent of the grapes are harvested by hand. The stemmer plucks the berries off instead of threshing them; a hose pump moves the mash into the press without crushing it.

Instead of sulphuring the must, we have worked for four years with must yeasts that occupy the space before anything else can. This preserves aromas, prevents oxidation and saves a lot of sulphur. Many wineries skip this because the yeasts are expensive and their effect can’t be seen. We see it in the Sturm (partially fermented young wine), which stays in our cold room for a long time.

Afterwards, the whole mash runs through a tubular heat exchanger and is cooled to below 15 °C. Because it’s cold, we can leave it to stand for four to twelve hours — some wines stay on the mash for a whole night and aren’t pressed until the next day. After pressing, we stir the must repeatedly for six hours to draw the last aromas out of the sediment.

We fine with pure potato protein. This means our cellar works one hundred per cent vegan. We don’t use flotation: everything settles by itself in the cold room, and the clear must is drawn off.

The yeast that travels through the whole cellar

At the start of the harvest, we prepare a single neutral sparkling-wine yeast. Once a wine is in full fermentation, we take a bucket of it and add it to the next fresh tank. This way, the same fermentation travels through the whole cellar — we get through the entire harvest with just one or two packets of yeast.

This isn’t a cost-cutting measure. A yeast that has been fermenting for four days is more alive than a freshly prepared one, in which half the cells lie dead in the packet. And because the yeast is neutral, you taste the vineyard, not the yeast.

Over the years, we’ve tried flavour yeasts several times. Each time we went back — you can read about it on our mistakes page.

Red wine

After fermentation, the wine stays on the mash for ten to twenty days, depending on how quickly it runs through. It is then pressed, left to settle for two days — and goes straight into the barrique.

We don’t carry out malolactic fermentation at the same time as the alcoholic fermentation, but afterwards, in the barrel, over the first winter. This is the most important stage. The wine lies on the fine lees during this time and stays there until shortly before bottling.

Malolactic fermentation is often only finished in February, sometimes not until May — and only then do we add sulphur for the first time. This saves us a considerable amount of sulphur.

White wine

The white wines stay on the full lees until around December. We then rack them, check whether they still need bentonite, fine them — and leave them on the fine lees until March. Bottling takes place at the end of March, beginning of April.

Wines matured in wood also go through malolactic fermentation for the whites, just as with the reds: fine lees over winter, first sulphuring between February and May. These wines usually come out of the barrels at the end of July.

The ranges

Reserve. The patient range. Depending on the variety, 20 to 80 per cent new barrels — more for full-bodied varieties such as Merlot, Cabernet and Syrah, less for Pinot noir and St. Laurent. We also adjust the proportion of new wood to the vintage. For red wine, we work with 300-litre barrels and are currently switching to 500 litres: the larger the barrel, the more the wine and the less the wood comes through in the taste. Pinot Gris is our only white reserve wine — three 300-litre barrels, one of them new every year.

Selection. For the white wines, roughly half wood, half steel tank. The steel portion retains the malic acid and thus the freshness, the wood portion goes through malolactic fermentation; in summer, both parts are blended. Bottling takes place at the end of August. For the red wines, only used barrels are used, for twelve months.

Classic. Matured on the fine lees, no malolactic fermentation, early bottling. The wines that most guests drink from the list — reliable, true to variety, drinkable young.

Purist. Minimal intervention: long maturation on the full lees, hardly or not at all sulphured, unfiltered. An attempt to consistently leave things out — what remains? Purist wines aren’t reproducible; they’re a little different every year, sometimes even from batch to batch.

What ends up in the bottle

Our red reserve wines are mostly between 40 and 70 milligrams of total sulphur — very little for wines of this style. This is made possible by the late malolactic fermentation in the barrel. For the white wines, the values are higher.

The art here isn’t the low total value, but the ratio: a wine is considered stable from around 30 milligrams of free sulphur. We achieve this at around 60 total sulphur — a lot of bound sulphur would be the easier but worse way.

You can work it out yourself: the values are listed for every wine in the shop.

The barrels

Our oldest barriques date from 2006 and 2007. We fill a barrel five to eight times.

It's not about the taste of wood for us — quite the opposite. A used barrel gives off hardly any aroma but lets the wine breathe. It becomes rounder, the tannins become more pleasant. That's exactly what they're for.