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 [...]

Ed writes: Our caretaker in Cauquenes is Ismael Enriques, who is 70 years old. He says that when he was a kid, the País vineyard on our property was already old. He remembers helping his dad put the roof on the adobe house on our property when he was ten years old. Don Ismael has [...]

Ed was recently in Cauquenes for the first time since the earthquake. He reports:
I finally made the trip down to Cauquenes three weeks after the 8.8 earthquake on 27 Febuary. Cauquenes is about 50 kilometers from the epicenter. The town is still under military curfew, and the schools have not opened yet. Most of central [...]

We were down in Cauquenes for New Year’s Eve, camping out in our remote little corner of the planet. We’ve made a lot of progress on the vineyard, with new water tanks and a piping system that enables us to water the new plants. We had an unusually wet spring, with rain every three to [...]

We were in Cauquenes over a long weekend recently, checking on the new vineyard planting. Over the winter, we cleared two and a half hectares and planted just under one and half. The original idea was to plant all the cleared area, but the nursery that was going to supply a large share of our [...]

It’s been ages since I’ve written about the vineyard project in Cauquenes, but that doesn’t mean the project is languishing. We’re moving forward with the first phase of planting, despite a few obstacles. One of the first challenges when establishing a vineyard is ensuring a water supply. Cauquenes gets more the twice the rainfall of [...]

We were out at Cauquenes on the weekend of the 8th. Don Ismael has done the initial clearing of the vineyard site and fenced off the old adobe building that we use for storage (and our base camp when we visit). Things are really moving along.
We met a new surveyor while we were there and [...]