Our 2015 (non) vintage

2015 was not a good year: too hot and dry in the first part, too wet and cool in the second.

As usual efforts were made to keep things orderly in the optimistic case something might come of it but in the event nothing went right. Masses of spraying against powdery and downy mildew would have been necessary and we were just not there at the critical moments.

As usual, the red grapes, Triomphe d'Alsace (or just 'Triomphe' as it is now called) delivered but without ripening properly despite leaving them for a week longer than usual.

Johanniter

Some of our new generation vines looked promising but we missed the boat with harvesting these.

As usual, the birds went for our Rondo grapes first. Eventually this is what all our vines looked like - white and red.

Nil desperandum, we covered all surfaces with polythene bought specially this year in preparation for what became a rather pathetic crop of about 35 liters.

We had even bought a new 20 liter French Oak barrel as an experiment, never having put our juice in wood before.

this is what the juice looked like: maybe a bit lighter than usual?

We debated whether to save the barrel for another year because it would no longer provide new oak if we used it this time. The decision went in favour of using it on our rather unripe 2015 juice in the hope that the wine would taste of something other than our poor grapes. We'll report in about 18 months.