Vintners raise a glass to excellent harvest

Swiss wine growers harvested a bumper crop this year, with the Federal Agriculture Office saying the wine was also of excellent quality.

Winemakers produced more than 1.1 million hectolitres from the 2011 harvest, which was 4.3 per cent above the average amount of the past five years.

The Agriculture Office said the exceptionally warm spring and sunny and dry late summer and autumn were key factors contributing to the quality of the crop.

The unseasonably warm April encouraged the vines to bud early – about three weeks earlier than the year before.

The harvest was largely completed by the beginning of October. 

Vineyards account for nearly 15,000 hectares of land across the country, a figure that is almost unchanged from 2010.