At Rijk’s Wine Estate in Tulbagh, we've just finished harvesting our high quality grapes. Looking back, we're happy to say that we've had a successful harvest here on our farm.
The growing season leading up to our 2022 harvest started with extremely cold winter weather, providing a perfect, well-deserved resting period for our vines.
This was followed by a good rainfall season, stretching from May to October, ensuring that our dams were full and that the vines had enough water in the soil for the growing season that followed.
We started with pruning a little later than usual in August and the first two weeks of September, just before bud burst, which set the pace for the season ahead, ensuring consistent growth.
This year, the bud burst was a little later than previous years, only around mid-September. Regardless of this, it was evenly spread across our vineyards and provided a well-balanced canopy and shoot positioning, which is crucial for quality later in the season.
We experienced the usual hot days from December to February, but the night temperatures cooled down to around 10-14 degrees Celsius.
Harvesting started 4-5 days earlier than previous years, with both the Chenin Blanc and Pinotage reaching optimal ripeness at more or less the same time. This resulted in the farm and cellar team having a jam-packed month, with the last grapes coming in on the 19th of February.
This year's overall grape quality is excellent, and the wines show tremendous potential. Although the bunches and berries were smaller this year, they had lots of colour and flavour concentration.
This year, we celebrate our second year without conventional spraying programs of any chemicals. We are very proud of this. The vines look happy and they are in great shape, and with post-harvest vineyard care in full swing, we aim to ensure we keep up the outstanding quality expected from Rijk's.
As always, we are paying homage to the vineyards.
With the wines done fermenting and safely tucked away in the barrel for maturation, the waiting game starts. We are very optimistic about what this year's yield has in store for us and excited to share the magic with you when the wines are ready.