No harvest

There was no harvest this year, as a result of cutting back and spraying too late, combined with bad weather conditions. Very few grapes grew, and most of those had mildew.

4 buckets were all I picked, most of which we put in a juicer rather than eat.

This year to buy grapes for winemaking costs twice of last year, about 150 Ft/kilo (50 Eurocents) - that's considered very expensive.

Some more pics:

Some nice baby carrots and end-of-season apples though!

Not a great year for fruit

This year the fruit trees mostly are not very productive. There were almost no cherries, we have very few apples and not a large amount of peaches - two types, one with white flesh and the other with orange flesh.  On the other hand one of our trees is laden with big healthy-looking pears and there are a lots and lots and lots of plums - Györgyi already dried some and made loads of jam.

The few apples and peaches we got look nice though :-)

Tartar

While racking the white wine, a piece of 'tartar', or 'wine stone', fell out from one of the barrels. It's about 1.5cm wide.

It's a lot of work

In the springtime we met people from Budapest who had bought a neighbouring piece of land. They spent a morning pruning their vines.  Recently I noticed their land is completely overgrown and they have no fruit.  I guess they gave up when they saw the amount of work needed to maintain the vines.

Not that I can talk, since Sanyi does all the heavy lifting :-)

Stainless steel storage container

We racked the white wine again in July. We had two barrels originally of white. After disposing of the lees, the remainder almost fitted into one barrel except for about 40 litres or so. Not sure what to do with this at first, I remembered the wine storage container I was given as a gift a couple of years ago. I went off to get it and cleaned it quickly. It stores 30 litres and the rest we put in some plastic containers.

The storage tank came with a bottle of paraffin which I had been told should be poured on top of the wine to preserve it.  Now, the idea of pouring paraffin on top of my nice wine was pretty scary, so I didn't do it.  Afterwards I got in touch with a distributor in Australia who confirmed how to use it, so will do that next time I'm at the cellar. This picture doesn't show that top of the wine is a floating lid, around which there is about a half mm of space where the paraffin should go, and then the main lid is placed on top.

This stainless steel storage container was manufactured in Slovakia. When I searched for such containers on the internet I found very very few links, and interestingly one of them was in English from a distributor in Hungary. My guess is that for home winemaking these are not widely used, although (larger) stainless steel containers are commonplace in commercial production today.

I'm looking forward to tasting this wine now it's been in the container for a couple of weeks (without paraffin on top) to see whether or not it has gone off. Hopefully not, although as the white is a bit acidic in the first place I won't lose sleep in case it is.

Poor 2010 harvest expected

Unfortunately we will have a poor harvest this year. The vines were cut back too late and sprayed too late, which combined with the mixture of hot and wet weather means many of the grapes have not developed. Probably we won't have enough to make it worthwhile making wine.

Refermented?

When we opened a couple of our recently-bottled bottles, bubbles appeared in the neck.  I also notice a few bubbles in one of the bottles lying down.  It tasted fine, but perhaps the following is the problem. Maybe as a result of the wine getting too much disturbance and oxidisation during the bottling.

Refermented 
Fine wine is a living thing, the product of controlled fermentation. Occasionally, some residual, dormant yeasts will wake up, and a wine will undergo a second fermentation after it has been released and shipped. This manifests itself as effervescence, or fizziness, on the tongue. Of course, this is desirable in champagne (which is purposely refermented in the bottle in order to create the bubbles), but never in fine still wine.


http://nymag.com/restaurants/articles/wine/essentials/badwine.htm

Lessons learnt

This weekend I plan to open one of the bottles we bottled four weeks ago and see how it tastes.

There are a number of things we could have done better, at least in theory.  Before putting the wine into them, the bottles were simply washed out with water and just left upside down in the sun for a while. So we're not talking about a perfect sterilization here! Then we used a garden hosepipe with a funnel to fill the bottles, with my thumb over the end to control the flow - this means the wine gets oxidated a lot which isn't good for it - the more correct thing is a narrow tube which you insert to the bottom of the bottle and I guess you can pinch the tube to control the flow.  And it was only after putting corks into all the bottles that I remembered the shopkeeper told us to soak them in water overnight beforehand... although considering cork resists water I can't see this making a giant difference. Well, lessons for the next time.

The costs were not massive. Each bottle costed around 120Ft (40 Euro cents), and the corks and foils costed very little. Fancier coloured glass bottles would have been a bit more, about 160Ft, but for a red wine which will be stored in a cellar, colour wasn't important. The investment was the corking machine at 15000Ft (50 Euro), and it was worth it - there are cheaper models available but harder to use.

However even with considerable economy of scale, I cannot see how professional wine makers can make a profit producing  wine which retails on the supermarket shelves for as little as a few hundred forints a bottle .

Bottling in pictures

Last weekend we bottled the red.  I hadn't done much preparation and afterwards realized I did most everything wrong. I'll write more about that later. 

Still, we now have 91 bottles and took away an additional 8 litres for quick drinking.

Here are the highlights.

First wash the bottles...

Dry them...

Down into the cellar...

The target of our affections...

Prepare the funnel...

Start siphoning...

Resist the temptation...

In go the corks (no action shot)...

Always important ... an attractive young lady to market your product...

On with the foil caps...

And pile 'em high...

Greener and greener

Little grapes start to appear:

Cherries too (and strawberries from the neighbour):

Spring is in full flight

The vines are now really in leaf.

Pruning and 4 weeks later

On the last weekend of March the pruning was done, we racked the white wine, and I took lots of nice pictures. Then most of them got deleted when my external HD got confused.  Only a few remainded...

A big pile of small branches:

A small pile of big branches:

A blood red sky at the vinyard:

And then.... last weekend, just 4 weeks later, I got a surprise. All of a sudden it seemed like the season changed and the previously barren-looking vines are covered with opening buds.

This unwelcome cserebogár/cockchafer had his meal interrupted...

Spring has sprung

Not much happens over the winter but now the spring is here the work begins again.  The vines are budding and this weekend I'll get to see how they look. They will be severely cut back to encourage new growth.  Also the wine needs to be racked again. I'm thinking of bottling the red as I'm concerned that once we rack it (it currently fills the barrel right to the top) there will be air inside the barrel which is unlikely to improve its quality over time. For that I'll need to buy a bottling machine, don't know how much that costs yet but might be a good investment.  And of course I'll need about 100 bottles too.

Meanwhile I have a couple of items which severely test my Hungarian language knowledge.

An thriller on video - The ABC of Pruning - something I won't personally be doing!

And a nice old book about grapes and wine:

... this page is about racking: