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 [...]

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 [...]

Ed writes: Our caretaker in Cauquenes is Ismael Enriques, who is 70 years old. He says that when he was a kid, the País vineyard on our property was already old. He remembers helping his dad put the roof on the adobe house on our property when he was ten years old. Don Ismael has [...]

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 [...]

Ed was recently in Cauquenes for the first time since the earthquake. He reports: I finally made the trip down to Cauquenes three weeks after the 8.8 earthquake on 27 Febuary. Cauquenes is about 50 kilometers from the epicenter. The town is still under military curfew, and the schools have not opened yet. Most of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]