The Right Moment in Time Determines the Quality of the Wine

In viticulture harvesting means picking the grapes.

Manual (traditional) harvesting as practiced at the Hillinger Winery signifies picking grapes by hand. Thereby the possibility exists to select only particularly ripe grapes to increase quality.

In our region harvesting starts around September after the grapes have noticeably gained in size from mid-August onwards. The ideal date on which to start harvest requires a lot of sensibility. The grapes should have accumulated as much sugar as possible but at the same time have not yet lost too much acidity.
Harvesters and contractual vintners pick the grapes into small boxes and deliver them directly to the production site of our winery where the cellar master conducts a final quality control.
The subsequent hand-selection on a conveyor belt, carried out by four employees, is followed by destemming (removing the stem from the grapes) and pressing (the grapes are crushed in a pneumatic press by means of a bellow allowing the must to run off).

Spring too is a high season in the vineyards. The next intense working phase starts around June. The undesired shoots of the vines have to be removed in order to promote growth. Fruit sets are cut off to decrease yield and thus increase the resulting quality in autumn.
Particularly our top-cuvée Hill1 is based on special vineyard management measures. Here the selection aims at a limitation of 1,5 kg per vine.

Just like many wine producers of today, we too base our success on traditional as well as up-to-date viticulture. Organic viticulture is gaining ground in Austria and helps to increase the importance of Austrian wines on the world wine market.

Many working steps are necessary until a bottle of wine finally reaches the wine lover. Due to intense research we succeeded in decisively improving the quality of our wine. This means that there has never been as good and qualitatively precious wines as there are today.