Flaherty Wines

Spring is such a beautiful time of year. Everything turns green and lush, and the explosion of flowers provides soul-cheering color. Our view improves tremendously as the vineyard starts to push. In winter, the view from our living room is of a barren field of white posts:*

The vineyard doesn’t really fill out until November, but the early shoots and the California poppies change the landscape dramatically:

After about six weeks, the work of shoot thinning begins. Ed does the thinning himself over the course of few weekends in mid- to late October.

Tempranillo is fairly vigorous, so he usually does a second pass later in the growing season.

*Rather than use pressure-treated wood (which still involves arsenic here), we found an environmentally friendly process developed at Chile’s Universidad de Concepción. We love supporting the local technological efforts, but alas, the posts are strikingly white.