Friday, 22 February, 2019
Diemersfontein Wine and Country Estate
The rush of Pinotage grapes is over with the first Diemersfontein ‘Coffee’ style Pinotage 2019 already finished with fermentation. Now Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz is taking the lime light.
The last two weeks extremely warm weather has been challenging with grape sugars jumping to high numbers, but we where able to irrigate and pick what was needed.
The effects of the drought is still very clear with our volumes down on our 2018 harvest, but the quality is looking very good.
The last of the grapes to come in is our Roobernet, one of a few varieties that has red juice and that we add to some of our wines to give an extra colour component, the Petit Verdot and Mourvedré.
In the meantime we are preparing the Diemersfontein Merlot 2018 for bottling so watch out for this new vintage on shelf within the next couple of weeks.
Wow, February 2019 really lived up to it's reputation of being the hottest month of the year. We realised again why many people jokingly refer to this beautiful region as 'Hell'ington with temperatures soring to above 40ºC.
The sweltering heat certainly did not deter us from getting on with #SAHarvest2019, for now, I am off to go check on my tanks.