The latest ever late harvest of botrytis grapes (or noble rot) at Delheim takes place today (2 June 2010).  Usually, the late harvest is completed by the first week in April.

Delheim’s viticulturist, Victor Sperling explains:  “With cold nights and dry days – but not too hot days – the conditions have been absolutely ideal for the growth of healthy botrytis.  Lots of rain combined with some cold weather prevented sour rot and yielded more botrytis rot.  We have picked twice already and removed only the best infected bunches; the small amount of juice that we have recovered from overnight soaking has been handled like gold!  Today, we pick the last bunches.”

Last week, the remaining botrytised grapes were still full and plump with juice; ideally they should be shrivelled and contain a little, but very concentrated, juice.  Delheim decided to risk leaving them on the vine a while longer to perfect the process.  As some rain is forecast, these will now be picked today.

Delheim expects 2010 to be an award-winning vintage. 

Botrytis grapes are grossly unappealing to the eye.  Having progressed from a healthy golden hue to become a mass of brown, shrivelled berries, they are peppered with the fungal growth necessary to create the texture and unique, desirable honey, toast and apricot flavour profile of a botrytised wine.   This was the sight that greeted the legendary Spatz Sperling in 1979. 

Having written the harvest off as basically useless, he ran into Simonsig’s Frans Malan at the post office.  The usual harvest discussion ensued and Spatz lamented his bad fortune: “I may as well write off this vineyard – all shrivelled with botrytis, muggies everywhere and the most awful sweet-sour smell.”  Frans  exclaimed: “No man, Spatz – that is noble rot!  The best base for a noble late harvest wine!”

Not quite believing him, Spatz nevertheless rushed home. The cellar had already closed for the day and the discouraged workers were about to head home. “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen – those vrot grapes we have been worrying about are actually very good. We must go and pick them straight away!”

“The poor grapes looked at me sourly”, Spatz remembers, “but by four in the afternoon, we had gathered about two tons of the most rotten grapes I had ever seen. There was hardly any juice left in them; just an amalgamation of raisin grape nectar. An urgent half-hour phone call was placed to Germany, the home of Edelbeerenauslese, to get the recipe on how to make wine from this gemors.”

As it turned out, this first effort to make a Botrytis cinerea wine reached the market as Delheim Edelspatz, and was a big hit. 

Since then, Delheim has tried to make the Edelspatz Noble Late Harvest every year, weather permitting of course, in bigger or smaller quantities.  Delheim has even experimented with trying to create the ideal climatic conditions artificially, with no success, leading us to the conclusion that these things are best left to Mother Nature.

Delheim is absolutely thrilled with the quality and looks forward to a truly superb Edelspatz 2010. There’s a silver lining in every cloud too:  this latest ever late harvest at Delheim will go some way to make up for the poor Sauvignon Blanc harvest earlier this year, when more than half the crop was lost due to wind damage during the summer.

Categories: DELHEIM

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 12:45 pm and is filed under DELHEIM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.