Flaherty Wines

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 [...]

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 [...]

I just want to let everyone know that we are all fine here at the Flaherty homestead. We had quite a scare, as the quake went on and on for a full three minutes. That’s long enough to wake up, wait for it to pass (as they usually do), realize that it isn’t passing, get [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s official: We’re buying vineyard land in Cauquenes! Ed made an offer on one of the properties he’s been viewing, and the offer was accepted. The offer was based on a price per hectare, so we had a surveyor come out to measure the land. The property had been estimated at around ten hectares, but [...]