Vintage 2012

Character of wines

In many ways the 2012 vintage reminds of the 2011 vintage. Both vintages were hot, and the 2012 vintage was even hotter and earlier than 2011, but 2012 had not the severe lack of water like in 2011. Observant fans of our 2011 maybe recall, that our wine 'Magic Rain' was harvested a week after a full day of rain that unblocked the stagnant vines, and made their grapes finally ripening beautifully.

The hallmark of the 2012 vintage was the galloping ripening of the grapes. They ripened beautifully, but due to the accelerated pace, the greenness and herbs were not softening and enough developed to fruitiness before the sugar approached alarmingly high levels. And it was not lack of water that was the problem, and consequently no rain magic was needed before the harvest.

Round tannins have now resolved and softened up, typically as happens in red wines. In 'Elephant tap' and in 'Rake & scoop the tanning is already fully resolved,and 'Box fixture it is detectable only if you know of it. The 'Multiplexor' and 'Laundry hanger' are more powerful and can hide more tannins, but have been closed and still need a year or two in bottle.

The situation in 2010, 2011 and 2012 were all different, and create exciting vintage variation in our wines. We are happy to reflect the vintage character in our wines, and hope our customers appreciate this, since such variations come from natural variations of conditions in the vineyards.

Usage of our vineyards

We have for several years renovated our vineyards, like applying new poles and wires for the training system, cut down to adjust for new training system, and engrafting varieties that are not suitable for the hot micro climate.

In the vintage 2012 we started to use grapes from Bishop Backyard for the 2012 'Elephant tap'. However, most of our Rhine Riesling grapes still come from the Genesis vineyard, see dividing the Genesis vineyard below.

As we made 2011, we also have produced an 2012 Olasz Rizling wine from our Earl Ridge vineyard. See the fifth wine below.

Dividing the Genesis vineyard

The soil is very different within the Genesis vineyard. In the left lower corner of the vineyard, the soil is more fertile and convenient for the vines. In the right upper part, the soil is more barren and austere, which make the vines struggle more, which in turn results in much better grapes.

For this reason, we simply decided to divide the vineyard into four vineyards, and treat them separately. Thus we have produced two wines of different fractions from the left and lower part, and two wines of different fractions from the right and upper part, see the first four wines below.

Labels

As usual there are new labels to all 2012 wines. This year we desired to show some special wine making tools invented by us. We wrap each tool in a Window frame, like they had been tools supported by a computer application, selectable in a pull down menu. (Click on the labels to get high resolution images, .png around 3 M bytes).

- Elephant tap is a tasting tap applied to a mixing valve on one of our tanks, looking like a cute elephant.
- Rake & scoop are two hand tools used at pressing, when to stir the tray and to get samples from the flowing juice.
- Multiplexor is a one-in and four-out fork pipe, used to direct the pressed juice to appropriate fraction tank
- Laundry hanger is carrying the sign, which describes the content in a tank, in order to avoid mistakes.
- Box fixture is a tool to use, when loading a box with bottles, in order to fix the box size for pallet stacking

'Elephant tap'

This wine we call 'Elephant tap' and is made from 2nd quality juice from the low part of Genesis, and from 1st quality juice from Bishop Backyard harvested by us for the first time. The wine is our basic crowd please with its broad personality, and it is as usual made a bit sweeter than the higher qualities.