Wine with hand and foot
Autumn is clearly noticeable and it is time to harvest the grapes for our wine. It’s about Autumn, the term for the grape harvest itself has coined the term for the season. The grapes now come from the vineyard into the cellar.
The grape harvest takes place in the vineyard, then it goes to the press. Sounds almost like a book production – Gutenberg, who comes from Mainz, is not far and anyone who has already spent an evening with a good wine knows that it can be as interesting as a novel.
Nature, earth and ice candy
But before the machine processing, hands and feet are first put on. First of all, many hands are used to read and then mash with feet. When mashing, the skins of the grapes are torn and solid and liquid components mix. This favors the influence of phenols on the wine. Which ultimately determine the character and taste. He’s allowed to have something earthy. What is made possible by this procedure.
Taste preferences are currently going in a direction that is associated with naturalness. While around the 2000s wines with clear fruit aromas were popular, which were matured very clean in stainless steel. For some, it tastes like ice candy. Earthy aromas can also be unusual, at least in more extreme variants like it can happen with “natural wine”.
Of course, there are also taste trends with an old cultural product such as wine. Even in 2021, Allendorf will not blindly follow every fashion; rather, when dealing with trends, appropriate elements will be combined with one’s own ideas and circumstances. This is how exciting wines are created year after year, which express the interaction of man and nature in terms of taste.
Wine tastes good, but it takes a lot of work
Nature presents new challenges every year. This year there were high losses in red wine due to a lot of moisture and the cherry vinegar fly. The conversion to a purely organic farm is also a particular challenge. In doing so, strict requirements must be taken into account. But the work is ultimately rewarded with a unique wine. As a winemaker, work steps have to be taken at every season to determine which quality ends up in the glass. Whether during cultivation and upbringing the grapes in the vineyard, or now with the grape harvest and the Mashing in. Very good and less good grapes are sorted again. Later, during the expansion in the cellar, the procedure can again determine how the wine will ultimately develop.
If all of this is done with great care and the necessary knowledge – as with Allendorf – a wine that really has hand and foot is created. We are already looking forward to our Riesling from the Jesuit garden, but we are happy to give this year’s harvest some time in the cellar.
