Villa Wolf
April 29, 2009
A test of patience:Germany’s unpredictable 2008 growing season
BERNKASTEL/MOSEL, GERMANY— One of the great challenges of being a winegrower is having the patience to deal with the uncertainty of ever-changing weather conditions, especially at harvest time. This fact of winegrowing life is certainly not a new one, but it was severely put to the test in 2008.
Overall, the 2008 growing season was fairly normal, even unremarkable. We had a normal bud break in early May, followed by flowering, as usual, near the end of June. The summer was mild, with generally cooler temperatures and moderate amounts of rain. Not much of a summer at all, really. We didn’t have a single barbecue out on our lawn the whole summer! It was in September that the weather started getting fidgety. The month started out in promising fashion, with a week of sunshine.
But then it turned rainy and cool, slowing everything down and threatening to bring another onslaught of botrytis, asithad in 2006. Fortunately, the cooler temperatures in the Mosel kept the botrytis at bay and we had no problems with rot during the harvest. In the Pfalz, however, we had to do a lot of work to open up the canopy so that the clusters would get more air flow and dry more quickly between rain showers. Still, we had more work to do taking out the botrytis-affected clusters ahead of the main harvest.
Back home in the Mosel, the cool conditions continued into October, with mixed weather that jumped around from miserably rainy to merely cloudy to beautiful sunshine. All very capricious and rather frustrating. But that’s the test of patience I was talking about. Ripening had slowed to a crawl and the acidity of the grapes was still quite high, so therewas nothing we could do but wait. We had to be extremely careful that we didn’t get impatient and start the harvest too early. So we waited. And waited.
Finally, in mid-October, we were able to start the main harvest at Dr. Loosen. It was a fitful start, however, as intermittant cloudbursts interrupted our work. Slowly but surely, our intrepid harvest crew dodged raindrops and brought in the crop, parcel by parcel. And the results look promising. The extended ripening time was certainly a good thing for Riesling, which only gets better with a long, slow development on the vines. Already, the 2008 Dr. L Riesling, our first release, shows excellent depth and complexity, with bright acidity and very pure Riesling fruit.
So, weather headaches aside, the 2008 harvest has produced a fine vintage that clearly favors Kabinett and Spätlese. It reminds me of the charming 1998 and 2002 vintages. We were back to more normal amounts of Auslese, with a very small production of Goldkapsel Auslese from what little botrytis we did get. There was no BA or TBA, but we harvested a little bit of Eiswein on December 30, and a bit moreon January6. We’ll report again soon on the development of the wines from both estates, most of which are still in barrel. Until then, I’m afraid you will just have to test your patience!
—Ernst Loosen
Tags: harvest notes, loosen, wolf
