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 [...]

Tell me again, whose idea was it to double production? I feel like we are being inundated by wave upon wave of wine. Last weekend was a long one, as Good Friday is a holiday in Chile. It is not, however, a holiday for boutique wineries. We spent the day pressing out syrah to make [...]

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 [...]

We recently finished the first barrel rack for the 2010 vintage, and we have quite the collage of different wines in barrel this year. We received fruit exclusively from the Aconcagua Valley, with four distinctive lots each of Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon from the Manzur Encón vineyard next to the Putaendo River, Syrah from the [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]