farming

We farm gently and easy.
We’re proud and happy to work the soils of our family. We like it to be free, lively and diverse. Biodiversity is our most powerful workmate. Weeds play their part in building soil fertility and in balancing the biological community. We don’t want to destroy the insect and plant communities in our vineyards by heavy machines, tillage, deadly chemicals and fertilizers.
Healthy soils and strong plants are more important for us than “stylish and clean” vineyards. We try to establish a balanced vineyard-ecosystem. 

When nature is pushing in summer and when it comes to harvest in fall, it wouldn’t work without the great help of our family and friends. Thank you all!

terroir

Stuttgart is better known for Mercedes, Porsche or Bosch than for wine. The city is like a melting-pot in a valley basin. Inside a lot of industry, art, culture and eager busyness. On the slopes and sidelines forests and vineyards on fascinating geological keuper (marl and reed-sandstone) formations.

The longer I (Daniel) was taking the road, working for wineries on great terroirs (for example Peter-Jakob Kühn in Rheingau, Jean-Louis Trapet in Burgundy) the more attracted I was by the south-facing vineyard slopes of my family back-home in Stuttgart.

There you find the exciting geological keuper formations which make our wines herbal, fresh and spicy.

sites

Since 2020 we’re working our fields now on the south and south-west facing grand cru (vdp) sites Uhlbacher Götzenberg and Rotenberger Schlossberg and Untertürkheimer Mönchberg – most of them farmed by our family for generations.

soil

Slopefoot: Schilfsandstein, stony marl soil which is rich in minerals
Middle of slope: Bunter Mergel, deep loamy soil which is rich in limestones, iron and mineral nutrients
Top of slope: Stubensandstein, rich in stones, sand, limestone and plant fossils

winemakingwinemaking is low-tech and high-instinctive. Equally simple and difficult.  We harvest the grapes by hand, we’re mashing the whole-bunch grapes in vats by feet, we press the grapes gentle and slow with an old press. The wines ferment on their indigenous mother yeasts and age exclusively in old oak barrels. Our 1546-build vaulted cellar is a calm and sheltering home for our wines and barrels. After 12 to 18 months in oak barrels (225l-500l) the wines are filled into bottles by gravity. In exceptional cases of need we add tiny amounts of sulfur to the mash before fermentation or to the wine before filling (10-20mg/l). Except of that we’ll never add anything to our wines but grapes and love. We think through our way of working unique wine characters are produced. There are lots of great wines out there – we don’t want to copy any of them.