from vineyard and cellar
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September - October: It's Spring!
Another fairly cool spring with very little rain. Budding is even and started punctually in mid-September, although shoot development is progressing very slowly due to the dry weather. This way there is no rush with the spring chores like suckering, the removing of excess shoots, cleaning the stems and removing wild root suckerers. If things continue like this, flowering should start at the end of October under the best conditions.
July-August 2022: Cape Winter!
2022 has been a dry year so far. From January to July it rained around 70% less than in the same period of the last 10 years. Fortunately, August brought not only biting cold, but also more rain than usual, so that the soil is finally saturated and the region's water reservoirs are beginning to fill up again. At the end of August the dam of our main supplier Thewaterskloof was already 80% full. However, the rainy season is not over yet and we are confident that the dams will continue to fill.
June 2022: a nice ending!
The 2021-22 vintage ends on a happy note, with our Little Merlot 2019 being recognized as one of South Africa's Top 10 Merlot, chosen in the new eponymous competition :-)
And one more thing: After we released the MCC in May, it was quickly sold out. But don't worry, the 2022 is already in the bottle and busy with the second fermentation.
April/May 2022
Although the cellar work is significantly less than that in the vineyard, it is mainly concentrated on the few weeks after the harvest. Now it is time to bottle, label and certify the new wines. At Bein Wine, this means a lot of tedious work, as all is done by hand with us. The MCC also requires special attention with disgorging, i.e. removing the lees that collects in the bottle after the second fermentation. And packaging new formats like the bubbly is another challenge! As a reward, we can now offer new wines again, namely the already mentioned MCC brut rosé and the new vintage of our Merlot Reserve.
March 2022 - main harvest
On March 9th the time had come and we were able to harvest wonderfully ripe and healthy grapes for our flagship Merlot. The quality is promising, and after fermentation, the young wines went straight into barrels for completion of malolactic fermentation.
February 2022 - Harvest begins!
It is an open secret that our wine family has grown! The new kid on the block is a Bubbly,
specifically a sparkling brut Rosé MCC (for the insiders this means
Merlot Cap Classique ;-)
The harvest started early this year, namely on February 2nd with the grapes for this very MCC.
For the base wine, these must be harvested very early, for a lively acidity and low alcohol. The grapes
for the Pink Merlot followed on February 15, while the grapes for the main wine are allowed to ripen
further for another three weeks.
December/January 2022 - Midsummer
Midsummer really deserves the name this year, with warmer than average temperatures and, above all, very little precipitation, in January just 2 mm in total! At least we didn't have any extremely hot days as in some other wine regions further away from the coast, which were really suffering under the heat. On the other side, this advanced the ripening of the grapes, so we expect begin of harvest on the usual dates again.
November 2021 - early summer
At the beginning of November flowering began in the vineyard, as expected, beautifully evenly. Unfortunately, right then there was again a heavy rain of 25 mm, which was rather undesirable in this delicate phase. At the end of November, however, we see a good fruit set with little millerandage only, and we are looking forward to a good harvest!
Our story told from another perspective
5 October 2021:
"The Merlot specialist with donkeys and drones" writes Chris Boiling in the on-line
wine magazine CANOPY of the IWC.
Read on here...
September-October 2021 - it's spring in the Cape
After this cold, rainy winter, spring itself was characterized by comparatively little rainfall and moderate temperatures. These are ideal conditions for budding, which actually began evenly in mid-September. Last but not least, there was again a decent rain at the end of October, certainly a good booster for the dry summer months to come.
July-August 2021 - the rainy season!
Winter is the rainy season in the Cape. Fortunately, after several dry years with corresponding water
scarcity, we got some decent rain again. And this winter brought so much that for the first time
since 2014 all water reservoirs in the Winelands were full. But it was cold too, very cold - a real
Cape winter!
However, we had an unusually warm period in June. Even the birds were
surprised and started breeding in vineyard and garden. The weaver birds
began building nests, and the first chick of
our Dikkop family (Burrhinus capensis) hatched 3 months earlier than usual! A pair of Hadedas
(Bostrychia hagedash) also tried their luck and nested in the acacia in front of our house.
At the end, however, the cold came back with the first heavy winter rains, and only the little
dikkoppie survived the miserable weather.
Previous reports have been condensed to vintage reports for each year and can be looked up there.
