Flaherty Wines

This past Saturday was the first day of the 2011 vintage at Flaherty Wines. Our crush started with Tempranillo again this year, as we picked about two-thirds of the fruit in our little vineyard. The grapes are riper this year than they have been in past vintages, with good sugars and forward fruit characters. This [...]

We brought in the last of the Cabernet on Saturday. What a relief! (Sorry, Ed, but this harvest has been hard, thanks to my shoulder problem.) It was about three-quarters of a ton, whereas we were expecting a full ton. Our grower says that Cabernet yields are down everywhere, so we wound up with less [...]

Saturday was Labor Day in Chile (May 1st), which limited the amount of work we could accomplish. In particular, we were only able to bring in one and a half tons of Cabernet Sauvignon from Gonzalo’s Encon vineyard. We’ll be getting another ton next Saturday to finish out our harvest. The fruit looks very good, [...]

We made it through last week with some warm fermentations, but no real problems in the end. We pressed out two of the bins on Saturday morning to make room for the second round. Syrah takes on good color and extraction right away, so the lots have remarkable depth despite the short maceration. (In fact, [...]

We knew this was going to be a late harvest based on the progress of the grapes over the summer, but I was still surprised by how long we had to wait. It seemed like the whole country was crushing, while we were just sitting around. It’s a bit nerve-racking to be doing nothing while [...]

Our Cabernet came in on Saturday as scheduled, and it looks really, really good. The fruit arrived very cool, and the weather has cooled off a lot this week, so we were able to do a long, cold maceration before fermentation. This will result in a full extraction of the fruit. It was interesting crushing [...]

We crushed our second lots of Syrah on Saturday—two more bins of 800 kilos each. This is the fruit from the side of the vines with afternoon sun exposure. (We harvested the morning side last weekend.) Again, the clusters were clean and ripe, with small berries. This is the last of our Aconcagua Syrah. We’ll [...]