Flaherty Wines

The last couple of weekends were busy with pressing out fermented lots. Our main cellar worker, don Armando, was unable to work, so pressing became a family affair. Sean was very enthusiastic about helping, while Ben mostly provided entertainment as he skateboarded around the press pad. Our friend Craig generously offered to help out as [...]

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 [...]

It’s happened again: summer has segued into fall. The days are still warm, but they’ve lost the intensity of summer’s dry heat. The nights are quite cool, the light is changing as the sun moves north, and the morning fog has settled in.  The kids started back to school this week. The country has returned [...]

Saturday was a long day, pressing out three Syrah lots and then picking and crushing the rest of the Tempranillo. We decided to postpone harvesting the last ton of Syrah until next week, so right now we only have one fermentation going (the Tempranillo). The remaining Syrah lots are all dry, and they just need [...]

We’ve had a rather short, but very intense summer. Spring was longer than usual this season, stretching well into December, and things only really heated up with a series of heat waves in January. That changed this week: we woke to an unusually foggy morning that segued into a mild breezy day. As a result [...]

We pressed out the last two bins last weekend, which means that harvest has officially ended. Our scheduled cellar hands canceled at the last minute, so we had a family winemaking day. (Don’t all families do that?) I just can’t say enough about our new press! It simply would not have been possible to get [...]

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 [...]