Flaherty Wines

We’ve been enjoying a cool spring for the last few weeks, sunny and fairly warm one day, then cloudy and threatening rain the next. Not that the weather around here does much more than threaten to rain—until flowering, that is, but that’s another story. The vines are finally starting to leaf out (or push, as [...]

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 [...]

We had a really long fall this year, stretching well into June, but last week we finally had a cold snap. Seemingly overnight, we went from this: to this: Now, cold is a relative term, and we certainly don’t get Wisconsin-level cold here. (I lived in Madison for a couple of years, so I do [...]

We’ve been thinning clusters for a couple of weeks now. It’s slow going, since we only have one person working the vineyard a couple of hours at a time. Granted, it’s a small vineyard, but that still makes for a long process. It seems so cruel to have anyone out there in the heat of [...]

We were out at Cauquenes on the weekend of the 8th. Don Ismael has done the initial clearing of the vineyard site and fenced off the old adobe building that we use for storage (and our base camp when we visit). Things are really moving along. We met a new surveyor while we were there [...]

We just spent our first weekend at the Cauquenes property as owners. We drove down on Friday, camped for two nights, and drove back on Sunday. It was a lot of driving, but a great weekend nonetheless. Don Ismael is our caretaker. He runs his six horses on the property, which has a huge effect [...]

And it was pretty touch and go. We met the three Quesada sisters at a notary in Santiago to sign the papers prepared by the bank. One of the sisters did not want to sign because she disagreed with the terms of payment. Not the price, just the terms. We went ahead and signed (we’re [...]