March 31, 2004

Spring has arrived in the Pfalz! Last week, the vineyards were covered with two days of snow and the weather reminded everyone of the coldest days in January. This week brought sun and warmth and everyone was working outside in short sleeve shirts. Sunburned faces and thoughts of spring made it clear as to why the Pfalz is known as “Toskana Deutschlands” or Tuscan Germany. The weather was so nice that one day we decided to forego coming back to the winery for lunch and instead had a summer picnic out in the vineyard in the middle of March.

The coming warm weather has us busily preparing the vineyards for the coming growing season. We have finished the pruning and we have removed all of last seasons growth from the vines. One team of workers is “binding” the trunk of the vines to the wires, while another team is in charge of bending and tying down the single fruit-bearing cane that remained after the pruning was finished. For a more detailed look at this work, visit the vineyard section of this website.

The Goldberg vineyard has been the main topic of conversation, and the focus of most of the work in the vineyard this week. Freinsheimer Goldberg is our biggest vineyard and produces some of our most sought after Riesling wines. The terraced slopes leading down to the lovely, Medieval town of Freinsheim offer a wonderful panoramic view of the region, but are notoriously difficult to work on. Because of this, and the fact that Goldberg is one of our biggest vineyards, made it the last vineyard site to be pruned and pulled out.

As the teams were pulling out the old growth it became apparent that an unusually large number of the posts used to support the trellis system were broken. In an average year, each vineyard has a handful of broken posts that need to be replaced for the upcoming year. These posts must support a tremendous amount of weight throughout the growing season, and after many years of service a few inevitably break under the strain.

We expect this, and the first task after the pruning and pulling out is completed is to walk through the vineyard checking the posts and wires to see if they need to be repaired or replaced. This week, we discovered almost 200 broken wooden posts in the Goldberg vineyard alone. No one had ever seen anything like this before, as the posts seemed brittle and were broken at the point where they enter the earth.

The news from the Goldberg vineyard quickly spread, and soon everyone descended on this vineyard to begin the gruelling task of digging out the almost 200 posts that are submerged a meter or more into the ground. New metal posts were ordered, and over the course of the week, we managed to put in the new posts and attach them to the system of support wires.

As the work and the week wound to a close, many theories were bandied about concerning the mysterious failure of so many poles. Rabbits and aliens were quickly ruled out as the culprit, and we finally agreed on the probable causes. Goldberg is one of our oldest vineyards, and contains some of our oldest wooden poles. Last summer’s relentless heat wave, combined with near drought conditions in the Pfalz seems to have been simply too much for many of the oldest and weakest poles in the vineyard. It was rather sad to see these old poles being taken away, as they have more aesthetic beauty than the newer metal poles which are stronger and easier to work with.

We have been so busy in the vineyards recently that not much has been going on in the cellars this week. The labelling machine has been rather busy as we had to label some wines for shipment to the United States. We label our wines just before shipment as our wine cellars are perfect for storing wines, but wreak havoc on paper wine labels. Probably the biggest news of the week was the removal of the plants and trees from their winter home in an underground root cellar. Each spring these plants are liberated from their dark, winter home and brighten up the estate grounds like Persephone returning to announce the coming of spring.