Planting a vineyard in Cauquenes has turned out to be rather more complicated than initially envisioned, essentially because we are trying to establish a dry-farmed vineyard. The region receives plenty of rainfall (around 700 ml annually), and the plot has deep clay soils that retain the water. The mature vines should thus do quite well [...]

We’re having a great spring in Cauquenes—fairly cool weather, occasional rain, lots of sunshine. There are a lot of wildflowers this year, and the rosehips are blooming. We haven’t seen the burrowing owls that normally hang out on the edge of the espino grove, but we saw partridges for the first time. We’ve made several [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]