March 15, 2004

This week began with the Monday morning arrival of an enormous shipping container. Advancing technology has greatly improved the ways in which a modern winery operates and has alleviated many of the burdens that once befell the vineyard worker. There still remain, however, those tasks that require good old fashion brute strength and the manual dexterity that only a worker can provide. Loading the shipping container was one of those jobs. Five of us rolled up our sleeves and loaded pallet after pallet of wine into the container and then arranged it in seemingly endless rows of newly labelled and packaged wine.

I mention newly labelled, as the wine we shipped had recently been labelled and boxed by a four person team working in the bottling room. We don’t label our wines until they are ready to be shipped in order to prevent damage or wear to the wines labels during storage. Wines love a cool, damp cellar, wine labels do not.

We managed to seal the shipping contained and send the wine on its journey across the Atlantic just as the weather began to take a turn for the worst. A late season snowstorm converged on the Pfalz and drove temperatures to unseasonably low levels. For two days, the vineyards were covered in a thick blanket of snow, making our work preparing the vineyard all the more difficult.

Most of our fellow vineyard owners chose not to battle the elements, and we received queer looks from some of our neighbors as our team rolled down the main street of Grosskarlbach in our tractors and vans on the way out to the vineyard. Indeed, it seemed that we were the only estate in the Pfalz willing to battle the elements to tend the vines during this week’s snowfall.

Our extra effort was well rewarded, however, as the vineyards were quite beautiful with their fresh covering of snow. It was unusually quiet and peaceful, as the silence was not broken by the sound of passing tractors and work vans. This solitude seem to embolden a large rabbit that came out of his hole to monitor our work.

Rabbits are notorious connoisseurs of wine grapes and are not adverse to nibbling on the young vines while they wait for the grapes to ripen. The fresh snow revealed a remarkable number of animal tracks (many of which were made by rabbits like our curious new friend), and we were reminded that many animals make their home in “our” vineyards.

These vineyard animals were the inspiration for a series of commissioned works of art that depict our small friends in their vineyard habitat.One of these works can be seen on a bottle of our popular “Bird Label” Riesling. The “Bird Label” depicts a whimsical little bird holding a Riesling grape in his beak. He is protecting this grape from a curious little worm that has emerged from his hole in the ground to find out more about the Age of Post Chardonnism. Our “Bird Label” has been so popular that we are considering letting some of the other vineyard animals have a label of their own, and someday you may see the rabbit we met this week in the vineyard starring on his own bottle of Lingenfelder wine!