17 September 2024 / Dániel Ercsey
I saw one of your social media posts which said you had finished this year's harvest on 24 August.
That’s pretty much true, only the Cabernet Franc had not been harvested, and we brought that in on 6 September; moreover, that vineyard is only 2% of our entire area, so technically we could say that we had finished the harvest on 24 August.
Péter Frittmann
What’s the reason for this early ripening?
It was clear from budbreak that everything was going to be early this year. Every year, based on the Kőszeg model, we also draw a picture of the grape's future - in fact, it's a picture taken on the same day, 24 April, of an Ezerjó cane - to see how the buds and shoots are doing. If you compare the pictures of the last few years, you can see that while in 2022 there were only intact buds, in 2023 there were small shoots of 3 cm and in 2024 there were 30 cm-long shoots and cluster rudiments. So you can't say we were caught off guard by the early harvest. By the way, we pictured shoots eerily reminiscent of this year in 2016, with the same cluster rudiments; the harvest started early then too, and now we also estimated the first half of August. We didn't expect to start on 28 July, but the heat was compounded by the drought.
How has the water shortage affected the ripening of grapes?
In times of drought, the acidity burns off, the grapes cannot develop, especially in terms of aromatics, and they may generate sugar if they can. The harvest was condensed into three weeks, because even the early ripening varieties had so much sugar that they needed to be harvested if we didn’t want to end up making fortified Port-style wine from them. Good weather, heat and lots of sunshine alone do not justify an early harvest. If coupled with sufficient rainfall, this sugar will be diluted, and the vegetation period will also be slightly longer. But the combination of persistently high temperatures - when the air doesn't even cool down at night - and the lack of water has resulted in an extremely early harvest.
Can you even harvest in this heat?
You can, but you shouldn't, because the quality of must arriving at the winery at 28°C will be worse. We have completely switched to harvesting at night or dawn. The harvesters go out at around 2 am, harvest the grapes under a floodlight, they are processed in the morning, and only the cellar operations are left for the afternoon. By that time, it is so hot in the vineyard you can’t do anything out there.
Are there grape varieties that find this more difficult to tolerate?
The Irsai Olivér held up well, but it is an early variety, almost the first to be picked. You could already see signs of shrivelling on the Czerszegi Fűszeres, as well as on the grapes destined for rosé. Unfortunately, Bácska, the resistant variety we planted with high hopes, turned out to be very poorly tolerant of water shortages - when we planted it, the rainfall was still normal. Since rosé is a key issue for us and the current varieties have difficulty withstanding the heat, we have already planted Mediterranean varieties Malbec and Sangiovese to prepare for potentially persistent heat.
But can these varieties cope with the winter cold?
If it were cold in winter, it would then be a problem, but we haven't seen much cold or snow in the last ten years. We are also increasingly neglecting winter covering, it is not worth doing, and sometimes you can even prune in December. It is spring frosts that are more of a problem, but you can’t really protect against that, or rather you can, but it is not a question of grape variety, rather a question of technology.
How did the early harvest affect the musts?
Fortunately, there were no problems! 2022 was another drought year, and like then, the grapes have also ripened now with beautiful aromatics, aromas and flavours. The alcohol is higher than we would have liked in some instances, the acidity is lower, but not horribly so. Yield averages are down a very little, and juice yield maybe more. In an average year, for example, the yield from Czerszegi Fűszeres may reach 79%, this year we scraped the bottom at 77%, but for one batch the rate was only 72%. The berries were shrivelled and did not contain enough moisture.
Barrel sample tasting
After 2022, 2024 was another dry, drought-prone year. How are you preparing for the future?
If it stays like this, we will have to consider irrigating the vineyards. This has been on the agenda for years, but it would force us into a spiral that we are resisting for the time being. One burning question is where the water will come from. In our area, the iron content of the groundwater is very high, so irrigation systems would have to be replaced every two years because of iron leaching. On the other hand, up till now we have conditioned the vines to extend their roots deep enough to reach the water. When you start irrigating, you are telling the plant “Hey, don't worry, the water is here", which will direct the roots back to the surface. If the system then breaks down or the water runs out, the plant becomes biologically more vulnerable. The risk is huge! In addition, irrigation incurs horrendous costs that we could not recover in the sales price of the product. It would be important for the authorities to come up with a serious water management plan, because the area between the Danube and the Tisza is slowly becoming a semi-desert, and this is destroying not only vines but also arable crops. In the past there were irrigation channels, we tried to keep the water, but these channels need to be cleaned up and put in order, because without them in a few decades you’ll only be able to go dune trekking by camel.
