The harvest started with the picking of sauvignon blanc and italian Riesling in the vineyards of the Archbishop of Veszprém Winery. Due to the dry summer months, the grapes ripened much faster than usual this year, so harvesting had to start three weeks earlier than planned. Despite the drought, Antal Benesch, the winery’s head winemaker, thinks we can expect a good vintage.
“Already in mid-August we started the preparation, the washing of the presses and the cleaning of the harvesting boxes. This year, everything is expected to be harvested almost at the same time, so it is very important to choose the right harvest date. In addition, this year we started work three weeks ahead of schedule, but I know of wineries where the harvest was already in July,” says Antal Benesch, head winemaker at the Archbishop of Veszprém Winery, about this year’s harvest.
This year, the harvest started with sauvignon blanc and continued with italian riesling. The former is harvested at different stages of ripeness and left to macerate for a day after the first picking. The berries are not crushed and the cold maceration allows the aromas to come out more clearly, giving the green, refreshing flavours, which often include nettle, elderflower, gooseberry and green tea.
Although extreme heat waves and drought made the summer difficult for winemakers, the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 were also quite wet, which was particularly beneficial for this year’s harvest. “We didn’t have much time to rest, as we had to start spraying and sorting the shoots very early in the spring, as the grapes were growing at an extreme rate,” explained the winemaker-in-chief. The rainy weather lasted until the beginning of June – during this period, the control of fungal diseases in the grapes also required a lot of work – but from mid-June until the end of August, there was no rain at all on the vineyards of the Archbishop of Veszprém Winery.
“Unfortunately, we have few tools to cope with the increasingly hot summers – the best we could do was to leave the removal of excess leaves around the bunches for later for both white and blue grape varieties, as the UV radiation was so high that the berries would have scorched in the sun,” stressed Antal Benesch.
Last year, 400 hundred hectares of grapes were harvested and 38,000 bottles of wine were bottled at the Archbishop of Veszprém’s winery. The chief winemaker is optimistic about this year: “if the harvest is not washed away by a heavy rain in the autumn, we have every reason to expect a good vintage”, says Antal Benesch.
