When I arrived at the two parcels of vines which my team and I planted at Weingut Klosterhof Töplitz in Töplitz/Brandenburg yesterday this is what I found. Just 16 days after planting almost 100% of the nearly 1,000 Pinotin vines we planted were already growing, some of them as vigorously as the vine pictured above. For almost 52° 30′ North that’s really not a bad result! This was due not only to the team’s dedicated work, but also to a near ideal weather pattern with alternating rainy and sunny days, no cold, but no extreme heat either. The large lakes on three sides of the “Island” of Töplitz certainly played a role in moderating temperatures and helping the vines get a really good start. More evidence that this 2.6 hectare / 6.5 acre south-facing slope is a “Grand Cru” site in the reemerging wine growing region of Brandenburg. Reemerging? Yes, the earliest record of wine growing here was in 1360 and it was Cistercian monks who were responsible. During the Middle Ages they also played an important role in establishing winegrowing regions as diverse as Burgundy and the Rheingau.
Tomorrow I leave for New York Wine CIty (NYWC) and my New York Riesling Diary will resume. It’s exactly two months since I left and I’ll no doubt find NYWC in a very different mood to when I left. This time I will be in the USA for almost three months and will do a lot of traveling, including the Riesling Road Trip organized by the German Wine Insitute which during the second half of June will take me by the land route from LA to NYWC via a southerly route through Las Vegas, Texas, New Orleans, Alabama and the Carolinas. These are all places which are new to me. In early July I’ll be in Vancouver/British Columia, then nearby Okanagan Valley, the most northerly wine growing region on the American continent, which will be exciting because this is serious Riesling territory that’s unfamiliar to me. However, even there wine growing doesn’t extend to 52° 30′ North!
Keep working ,splendid job! .Check