After three years of conversion to bio-production  we received for the first time bio-certificate of the grapes from the 2015 vintage as well as of the wine which will be produced from them. 2015 was a relatively good but challenging year. Cold and rainy May was followed by  warm and sunny weather with hot spells up to 41 °C which was replaced by extreme rains in the second half of August. Relatively cold and rainy autumn did not contribute to early ripening of the grapes. Despite of that we managed to keep the grapes in good health and harvest them in time before the threatening rain.

Our first certified bio-grapes encouraged us to continue further on our quest toward creation of natural  wines.  We decided to process the Welsh Riesling from the old vineyard in the Wolf Valley by fermentation and subsequent maceration on skins, a wine-style known as orange wine, and name it “Orange Wolf”.  The grapes were manually destemmed and mashed on forefathers antique equipment. The beautifully green mash spontaneously fermented in an open vat and the young wine was left in skin contact for further ten days while acquiring the extractive taste characteristic for the orange-style wines. We did not have enough of this wine to fill a barrel, therefore we had to top it up with about 30% of classically vinified Veltliner and Devin. They nicely fleshed out its character, however, the wine lost its right to bear the adjective “unplugged” even if we continued to handle it exclusively manually. The wine matured on its lees until October 2016, when it freed up the space for its younger brother. It was bottled directly from the barrel, without fining and filtering and no sulfites were added at all. Their content in the wine is a natural product of yeast metabolism.

Spontaneously fermented, unfiltered, unfined and unsulfited – unrestrained, natural joy in the bottle!