Flaherty Wines

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 central Chile delayed the first day of school for a week after the earthquake, but in towns hit hard by the earthquake, many of the schools were destroyed or damaged, so there is a shortage of class rooms. The town is colonial in style, with a high percentage of the houses built out of adobe with tile roofs. It seems like every other house has DEMOLER NO ENTRAR painted on the outside. If the house is still standing, often the roof has collapsed or all the tiles have slid off or it looks fine on the outside but is actually ruined on the inside. Backhoes and dump trucks are all over town, and the dust in the air gets in your eyes from the rubble of adobe bricks piled outside the houses. City hall will probably be torn down, and the bridge over the Cauquenes river is unstable and must be rebuilt. That’s the bridge we take to get to our property, so we’ll have to find another route once the river rises in the winter.

Our property in Tequel lies about 15 kilometers south of town, meaning it was 15 kilometers closer to the epicenter. Don Ismael, our caretaker, is sleeping in a converted chicken coop while he and his family build a new cabin, as they can’t sleep in their adobe home. Jen and I contributed a truckload of food essentials to help out. Most of the neighbors are without a roof or need to knock down their unstable homes. The old Quezada house on our property, parts of which are over 90 years old, is basically waiting for the bulldozer. The back veranda collapsed, and there are big cracks in the corners. Ismael and his son Javier will collect the roof tiles and any wood that is worth keeping. We will try to repair the charcoal hut, which has cracks but is still standing. The water tanks are also still standing. We were lucky that Ismael had just watered the vineyard, so they were empty when the quake hit. Otherwise, they would have fallen over and been smashed. We are planning to put up a quincho for camping on the property now to replace the house which we used for storage. A quincho is basically a roof over a BBQ pit with a cooking surface and a table for eating. We will also need to build some type of storage area for camping and vineyard supplies.