One distinctly Chilean food is piñones, usually translated as pine nuts. They aren’t from pine trees, however, but rather the Araucaria, or monkey puzzle tree. The nuts are quite different from Italian pine nuts. Pine nuts have a higher oil and protein content, whereas piñones are starchier, with a texture much like a chestnut. Also [...]

We spent last Friday evening and all day Saturday pouring at the eleventh annual Cata y Vino wine tasting. We had a great time meeting the people who stopped by to try our wine, and of course it’s always fun to hang out with the MOVI group. Our room had a live jazz band for [...]

When I was chatting with a friend at the wine tasting this weekend, she mentioned her recent trip to Canada and commented that she really enjoyed the toasted cinnamon-raisin bread for breakfast. That was all it took to kick-start a craving, even though I haven’t thought of raisin toast in years. I worked out the [...]

The Eleventh Annual Cata y Vino wine tasting will be held this Friday and Saturday at the W Hotel in Santiago. Flaherty will be participating again this year as part of the MOVI group (Movimiento de Vinateros Independientes de Chile), an organization of small family wineries in Chile. Like last year, all the group members will be [...]

I’ve mentioned our caretaker, Don Ismael, who lives near our property and helps us out with odd jobs. His wife, Sra. Zunilda, often sends Ed home with a gift of farm eggs or homemade bread for me, since I rarely get all the way down there myself. This past weekend she very kindly offered Ed [...]

This season, we made a radical change in the pruning system we use on our Tempranillo vineyard—namely, we’ve switched the vineyard over from a double-cordon trellis to head pruning. For some time now, we’ve been trying to address the uneveness in vine development across the vineyard, and this winter required a hard pruning to promote [...]

We recently undertook what was for us a rather large construction project: we refinished the winery floor and extended the crush pad out considerably by paving the driveway and parking area. Workmen were here for two weeks, first laying the baldosa (large cement tiles that can withstand production) and then pouring cement. The baldosa still [...]