Scharzhof Wine Cellar

Oeuvre

How we work in the cellar.

First of all, and with the best of our knowledge and conscience, let us preface this: We remain firmly convinced of the "natural wine idea", which unfortunately was abandoned with the wine laws of 1971 and sacrificed to a then and now absurd modernity. What was and is important to us: We were able to continue this natural wine idea in our cellar.

How does our idea of natural wine express itself? Ideally, in a good wine year, as most vintage years are today, we do not add anything to our wines - except for sulphur, a method that has been tried and tested for centuries to preserve the wines. Musts made from grapes with sufficient phenolic and physiological ripeness require little or no intervention to turn them into perfect wines in the cellar. To achieve this optimal ripeness, we take great care in working the vines in the vineyards and harvesting them there. This means that, where possible, we encourage early ripening of the grapes and early harvesting in order to increase our ability to harvest each plot at the right time and thus take advantage of all the opportunities that nature offers us. The transport and the pressing of the grapes are carried out in such a gentle way that we can easily do without any kind of fining.

All grapes are of course harvested by hand
anything else is out of the question for us.

The harvest is then transported in small containers to the press house, where Heiner Bollig, our cellar master at the winery, decides, depending on the vintage and the condition of the grapes, whether the grapes are first pressed or pressed as lightly crushed, whole berries. The size of the transport container and the press have been adapted to the size of our casks for quite some time. This allows us to press quickly and above all - which is becoming increasingly important - individually.

After pressing, we let the must "sit" (a quite wonderful term, we think) for 24 hours before it is then drawn off into the aforementioned Fuder casks or into stainless steel tanks. Fermentation, of course, is usually spontaneous and often "stops" by itself in the cool cellar of the winery, long before the wine is fully fermented and dry. This gives the wines their well-known and globally appreciated outstanding fruit sweetness. In fact, it rarely happens that the wines turn out in such a way that the entire sugar content is fermented. However, we are also pleased when, once in a very few years, genuinely dry Scharzhofberg Rieslings are bottled. Nature decides. And we rarely want to interfere.

Early in the year following the harvest, the wines are drawn off the lees and gently filtered. We at Egon Müller prefer an early bottling of our wines. And no too long vat or cask storage. We want to preserve the freshness that allows our Rieslings to retain their own special character over years and decades, thanks to their acidity and their sugar levels. And of course we also bottle the best casks of a vintage separately and hope that these will find those enthusiasts who want to bequeath at least a few of these bottles to their children or grandchildren.