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 [...]

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 are well into spring here in the southern hemisphere, and the vineyard is pushing nicely. It’s very pretty this year, now that we have eliminated all the posts involved in the old trellis system. We left a few posts up for the birds, but otherwise, we have a clear view across the vineyard to the [...]

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 [...]