2000 Grüner Veltliner Smaragd Hochrain

Parts of Wosendorf suffered hail damage this year, so selection had to be doubly stringent. At the same time, conditions required selection to be made in the course of a single picking of each vineyard. Pichler was also at pains to harvest sufficiently clean fruit to stand up to 18 hours of cold soak prior to being pressed (he employs dry ice to create a CO2 blanket and avoid sulfuring) and whose lees he could retain well into fermentation. (Note that his top rieslings were still on their fine lees when I tasted them in June.) With these strategies, Pichler hoped to supply some structural compensation for generally low acidity. quot;I knew this was our most expensive harvest ever," he says, "but I went ahead and ran the math. Per picker, per parcel, per hour we got on average only 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of fruit. In some sites it was a lot less than that." And this was prior to sorting in the cellar.