It appears, however, that we are finally moving forward. Nearly all the plants leafed out this spring, so we have a much more continuous vineyard than last year. Next winter we will start to gradually extend the planting, with a long-term goal of planting five hectares. We will be planting more petite syrah and tempranillo (probably a different clone than we currently have) and experimenting with cabernet franc and carignan.

In addition to planting, we improved the well last year by cleaning it out, digging about half a meter deeper, reinforcing the walls with concrete, and installing a pump. It is a surface well about 10 meters deep on the lower section of the property. We now pump water through a fixed line up to the water tanks and then gravity feed it from the tanks to the vineyard. The improved well gives us an excellent water source through at least half of the summer, so we’ll be able to irrigate the plants more consistently. Young vines need more irrigation in their first few years. Once they are established, we will gradually wean them from irrigation to encourage the development of deep roots.

We also installed protectors on the plants to keep them safe from hungry rabbits. Finally, we improved the fencing where the property faces the road.

We’ve made several advancements on the vineyard project. First, we replanted the sections of the vineyard that didn’t take last year. These were mostly syrah plants, with a small portion of tempranillo as well. the tempranillo plants are cuttings from our Aconcagua vineyard. The new plants have all pushed, so we are optimistic that they will take. We’ll be installing protectors around the plants next week, to deter rabbits.

We have also taken steps to improve our water access. First, we are now on the network for potable water and have installed lines running to the property. Second, we are in the process of recovering the old well. It isn’t deep enough to provide water year round, but it generally contains water through January. We installed a submersible pump for irrigating the vineyard, and later this year we will reinforce the well walls with precast concrete and build up the above-ground wall.

]]> http://www.flahertywines.com/chile/cauquenes-vineyard-update/feed/ 0 http://www.flahertywines.com/chile/farm-raised-turkey-a-review/ http://www.flahertywines.com/chile/farm-raised-turkey-a-review/#comments Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:28:50 +0000 jen http://www.flahertywines.com/chile/?p=1031 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 a turkey—either live or slaughtered, whichever he preferred. He opted for slaughtered since he didn’t want a pet turkey (it wouldn’t have lasted long with our dogs, anyway). A few hours later, the deed was done, and Ed was on his way home with Sunday’s dinner.

It was quite an experience. Farm turkeys are quite different from the plump frozen balls one finds in the supermarket. First, the bird was much, much smaller, weighing in at a mere 2.7 kilos (about 6 pounds). Second, there were feet sticking out of the bag. I quickly hid the bag in the fridge to be dealt with the next day, but was then haunted by the thought of zombie turkeys. On Sunday, I put off dealing with the turkey as long as possible—prepping the stuffing, making turkey stock for the gravy (using wings and drumsticks from the store), and starting a lemon meringue pie.

Eventually, I could put it off no longer. I hesitantly pulled the carcass out of the bag, and then promptly dropped it in the sink when I discovered it still had the head attached. The long neck flopped around as I tried to figure out what was what. I avoided eye contact as I pulled out the giblets. Sra. Zunilda had left me the liver, the gizzard, and… alien eyeballs? Seriously, six or eight bright orange orbs of varying sizes came tumbling out along with the liver. Between that and the head, I was seriously freaked out. I later learned that these were partially developed egg yolks—ovary follicles, I guess—which one boils and serves like hard-cooked eggs. So my turkey was a hen.

Next, I examined the neck to figure out where to cut it off. Using poultry shears, I snipped it off at the base and then quickly removed the feet, as well. Once the head was disposed of, my scientific curiosity kicked in, so cleaning out the rest of the carcass was less traumatic. The heart and lungs were still attached, along with various other bits I was unable to identify.

When the bird was thoroughly cleaned, I stuffed it, trussed it, and slid it into the oven to roast. I have quite a history of undercooking roast chicken, so I made sure this bird was very well roasted—about two and a half hours at 350 F. It was beautifully browned when I brought it out to carve (though I was still too traumatized to remember to take a photo).

The flavor of the meat was excellent, and the breast was moist and tender. The legs and thighs were tough, with a gamier taste than store-bought turkey. We had plenty for the four of us for dinner, plus leftovers for turkey sandwiches the next day.

Basic stuffing recipe

Butter
Onion, diced
Celery, diced
Garlic, minced or pressed
Bay leaf
Salt and pepper
Sage, finely chopped
Stale baguette, cut into cubes

I learned to make stuffing from a James Beard cookbook, and his general rule for just about everything is, When in doubt, add more butter. So, melt a generous glob of butter in a pan (I used a good 4 to 6 tablespoons for this small bird, so double that for a commercial bird). Sauté the onion, celery, garlic, and bay leaf until the onion is translucent. (Be careful not to burn the garlic.) Remove the bay leaf, season generously with salt and pepper, then stir in the sage. Toss with the bread cubes, and stuff the turkey.

For this small bird, I used 1 medium onion, 1 stalk celery, 4 cloves garlic, 1 or 2 tablespoons of sage, and about five cups of bread cubes (the better part of a whole baguette); double everything for a commercial bird.

Now, Ismael does not exactly work for me as an employee. He runs his five horses on our property and keeps up the fences so that the horses don’t run off. We negotiate (trato) every job that has to be done in the vineyard and on the property, and of course he knows the true value better than I do. It is expected that I bargain, but I’m not a great negotiator. So, while I generally do not just accept his offer, I often add on some details to the original job rather than haggle over the price. For example, when we prepared the land for the vineyard last year, he quoted the job to cut down the espino bushes and haul them to charcoal hut. He then used the wood to make charcoal (carbón), and we split the end product 50/50. He uses his share to heat his house, and I use mine for barbecuing. We sell whatever I think I won’t use. Last winter he grew potatoes on a patch that we cleared, and we split the harvest 50/50. This system of sharecropping is the way it works out here. The owner contributes the land and water, and sharecropper, or mediero, puts in the work, seed, and fertilizer. The crop is then divided 50/50.

It seems funny to give  a 70-year-old man such physically demanding jobs that I would struggle to do myself, but what I sense is that work is the very center of his daily life. If he wasn’t doing a job for me, he would find something else to do. Out here they cultivate wheat by horse and hand—a backbreaking job even for the young, but Ismael is still at it. His wife says she is too old now to keep up, but in her day she would have put me to shame. I believe her.

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 Chile delayed the first day of school for a week after the earthquake, but in towns hit hard by the earthquake, many of the schools were destroyed or damaged, so there is a shortage of class rooms. The town is colonial in style, with a high percentage of the houses built out of adobe with tile roofs. It seems like every other house has DEMOLER NO ENTRAR painted on the outside. If the house is still standing, often the roof has collapsed or all the tiles have slid off or it looks fine on the outside but is actually ruined on the inside. Backhoes and dump trucks are all over town, and the dust in the air gets in your eyes from the rubble of adobe bricks piled outside the houses. City hall will probably be torn down, and the bridge over the Cauquenes river is unstable and must be rebuilt. That’s the bridge we take to get to our property, so we’ll have to find another route once the river rises in the winter.

Our property in Tequel lies about 15 kilometers south of town, meaning it was 15 kilometers closer to the epicenter. Don Ismael, our caretaker, is sleeping in a converted chicken coop while he and his family build a new cabin, as they can’t sleep in their adobe home. Jen and I contributed a truckload of food essentials to help out. Most of the neighbors are without a roof or need to knock down their unstable homes. The old Quezada house on our property, parts of which are over 90 years old, is basically waiting for the bulldozer. The back veranda collapsed, and there are big cracks in the corners. Ismael and his son Javier will collect the roof tiles and any wood that is worth keeping. We will try to repair the charcoal hut, which has cracks but is still standing. The water tanks are also still standing. We were lucky that Ismael had just watered the vineyard, so they were empty when the quake hit. Otherwise, they would have fallen over and been smashed. We are planning to put up a quincho for camping on the property now to replace the house which we used for storage. A quincho is basically a roof over a BBQ pit with a cooking surface and a table for eating. We will also need to build some type of storage area for camping and vineyard supplies.

The vineyard generally looks good. The tempranillo and petite sirah cuttings had a good success rate, and most of the new plants are leafing out nicely. The syrah, on the other hand, largely did not take. The good news is that the nursery has guaranteed the plants, so we’ll get replacement cuttings to replant those sections this winter. The bad news is that we’ve lost a year of growth, and we will incur considerable costs in replanting.

Our original plan included planting two different clones of tempranillo—one from cuttings of our Aconcagua vineyard and the other from the now-quarantined nursery. The plants grown from our own cuttings were fine, as they were rooted by a local nursery, so we were able to plant roughly half the tempranillo originally calculated. We also were able to find syrah and petit syrah to round out the planting. The total came to 10,317 plants, which breaks down as follows: 4,377 tempranillo, 3,490 syrah, and 2,450 petite sirah. The vines are planted at a fairly high density of 1.2 meters by 1.2 meters, and they will be head pruned and dry farmed once established.

Finally, we decided to postpone grafting over the pais (or mission) to carignan, since we don’t have a good water source. By next year, we’ll have either a well or (more probably) a reservoir, so we’ll do the grafting then. Our caretaker will appreciate having grapes to make chicha for one more year.

Our first plan was to dig a well. A local engineer came out, complete with a set of divining rods, and estimated the water table to be within reach. At the proposed well site, he estimated that he would hit either water or bedrock at around ten meters. Sure enough, he hit bedrock at 11 meters. He was digging the well with a hand operated screw drill, and had he made it to the water table we would have had a very economical solution to the water problem. As it stands, the well is on hold, as we need to either continue drilling with a very expensive machine or try again at another site. On to plan B. Plan B is to truck in water for the new plants this year while we build a reservoir down in the boggy area of the property to start collecting water next winter. We’ll reconsider the well when he have enough vineyard planted to justify the expense.

In the meantime, we’ve been prepping the land for planting. Don Ismael cleared two and a half hectares with his draft horse. We then brought in a tractor to pull out the larger stumps, leaving a number of native Huingán and Espino trees in place. (They were just to pretty to rip out.) Next we ripped the soil down to two meters, which will facilitate root development in the early years. Finally, we put in new fencing around the projected vineyard site to keep out the horses when they are pasturing on the land in the spring and early summer.

We met a new surveyor while we were there and contracted him to do a property plan and coordinate some of the work, like getting a back hoe out to pull out the bigger stumps. His official survey placed the property at 14.4 hectares, instead of the 13.3 estimated by the last surveyor. So who’s right? The new surveyor was more thorough (he pulled out some bushes and cut back trees to get the proper lines), whereas the first survey was more of an estimate, so it sounds like 14.4 is correct. At some point we’ll look into updating the registry at the Conservador de Bienes Raices (Chile’s real estate registry).