Flaherty Wines

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 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 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 [...]

The grapes are starting to turn color in our tempranillo vineyard, a phase called la pinta in Spanish or veraison in French. In English, we sort of bastardize the French term and call it “verasion” (still spelled veraison). In addition to taking on color, the grapes also soften at this point and start producing sugar. [...]

Our tempranillo is in full flower. Flowering lasts about two weeks overall since it is staggered across the vineyard, with individual plants flowering earlier or later. The biggest concern during flowering is rain: a hard rain will knock the flowers off the plant before the fruit has a chance to set, which can devastate the [...]

We were in Cauquenes over a long weekend recently, checking on the new vineyard planting. Over the winter, we cleared two and a half hectares and planted just under one and half. The original idea was to plant all the cleared area, but the nursery that was going to supply a large share of our [...]

One of our few winter chores is pruning the vines. The main goal of pruning is canopy management, in the sense of controlling yields and achieving a good distribution of the next season’s clusters along the canopy wire. The clusters should hang freely and not overlap or bunch up, which would limit air flow around [...]