The red badge of honour

Feuersteig vineyard, Tinhof Lukas Plöckinger picks me up in Eisenstadt at 6.30am prompt, on a chilly October morning. Lukas is the winemaker and vineyard manager at Weingut Tinhof, in Austria's red wine heartland Burgenland, and he's my teacher today as I pop my grape-picking cherry. Why am I doing this? Because I'm hoping that a day's physical immersion in wine production, at the most important time of year, will give me a whole new slant on the subject that I call my passion. Today we're picking Sankt Laurent, Austria's native, silken red variety, from Tinhof's Feuersteig vineyard high in the Leithaberg hills. And I'm about to learn about one of Sankt Laurent's less desirable properties. Being a thin-skinned grape, it succumbs easily to Botrytis (or rot). All it needs is some rain at the wrong time of year, which is exactly what has happened during Autumn 2013, so we have a badly affected crop. After a short, bumpy ride up to the vineyard, I'm handed a pair of secateurs and a plast…