Saturday we moved most of the 2008 vintage to Viña San Esteban, where it will be stored in barrel until blending and bottling in about six months. The 2008 vintage was our largest to date, and we are planning to make about the same amount this year. We just don’t have the space for that many barrels in our cellar. San Esteban does our bottling for us, so they were the logical choice when we started looking for a barrel cellar.

To move the wine, we hired a truck and loaded up empty barrels on barrel racks. To move the wine, we don’t use a pump—we rack barrel to barrel using nitrogen pressure. We filled the barrels on the truck, which were offloaded with a forklift at San Esteban. Our friends Craig and Eduardo came up from Santiago to help out.

It’s the end of March, and still no activity here. We’ve had a fairly hot summer. In past years, we’ve had a strong heatwave around the first of the year, but late January and February were somewhat cooler. No such luck this year. February was hot, though with the cool evenings that are typical of the region. We don’t usually get fog in summer, but it tends to be more common as fall progresses. This year we’ve had all of two foggy mornings, and otherwise brilliantly clear skies.

Our Tempranillo vineyard is ripening well. We had some water issues early in the growing season (too much water early on, then a short period of drought when the irrigation system had to be repaired). Note the grass between the rows. This is mostly to improve the habitat for the birds, but it also helps to draw excess water out of the soil. In addition, Ed is letting the grapes shrivel a bit before harvesting, which will concentrate the flavors. We’ll probably be harvesting within a couple of weeks.

If you are interested in acquiring our 2006 Cab/Syrah, you can order 24/7 from La Cav online, following this link :

www.LaCav.cl

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 the day, so the thinning occurs from 6:00-8:00 pm. The dropped clusters just get, well, dropped, which makes them fair game for the four-legged residents of the Flaherty estate:

Is to get through malolactic. And the wines obliged. This is the latest date on record for Flaherty, and I’m sure Ed lost some sleep waiting for them to finish, but all the 2008 lots have finally completed their malolactic fermentations.

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…

We pressed out the last bin today—the second batch of Ovalle Syrah. It’s all in barrel for the winter. Phew. This was a very long harvest.

Noooooo…. Ed just called to let me know we’re getting another half ton of Pryor Syrah. I don’t know what happened—his workers started picking the wrong block, and it was either send us the fruit or dump it. I am so tired of punching down must. This will make it close to eight tons for the year. On the bright side, the Ovalle Syrah we already fermented looks really nice.

Things are finally winding down. We pressed out the Manzur Cabernet yesterday and received the last of the Pryor fruit—
860 kilos of Carmenère. One last bin, and then no more punch downs. Until next year….

Jim Pryor came down yesterday to deliver the first round of his organic fruit—860 kilos of Syrah and 730 kilos of Cabernet Sauvignon. We pressed out one of the Tempranillo bins on Monday, and Ed and Jim are pressing out a bin of Syrah now before they crush the new fruit. Otherwise there isn’t a lot we can do to make room. The Manzur Cab is only just getting going, and the second bin of Tempranillo has only just finished. We’ll probably have to press out the Tempranillo this weekend.