Here comes our wine to America

Hello to all who visit this site.

Since this is the start of our blog I need to be a little verbose with this first posting. Follow up notes will be a lot shorter I assure you so do come back to visit us often and if you like what you read here pass it on or post your thoughts.

Hawks Nest vineyard is part of a working fruit orchard located in Matakana, New Zealand. It is named for the native hawks that soar over the hills of Matakana. Matakana Coast is blessed with small pastoral communities, grass covered hillsides and pristine beaches. To see the Matakana Coast is to love it. My wife, Sandra, and I are from Nashville, Tennessee but moved to New Zealand part time in 1999. We love the rural NZ lifestyle of our valley but are just an hour north of the "big smoke" of Auckland. We spend half our time in Nashville where I still practice medicine as a gynecologist but we are always happy to get back to rural New Zealand and our country balmy coastal life here among the vines and fruit trees. (Hawks Nest is only about two miles from the Pacific Ocean) The bigger photo above was taken in late fall last year and you can see the lovely colors of the Malbec leaves around our property salient feature-the old chimney amongst the vines.
We bought Hawks Nest Orchard in 2000 as part of the process of becoming permanent NZ residents. (I was over 55 and did not want to work in NZ so we had to invest in the economy in order to qualify for resident status- NZ does not want retired deadbeats moving here to live which makes good sense to us) Anyway, we added grapevines in 2001 to our 17 acre orchard property and now have our first release of Matakana Coast red wine. This year we are only selling in Middle Tennessee and the Rodney district of New Zealand due to our limited supply from our first release. ( There are only 80 cases in Nashville available from our importer/wholesaler, Lipman Brothers, and 120 cases on offer here in New Zealand)

For those of you with specific knowledge of grapes, we grow Malbec and Cab Franc which are excellent varieties for our clay soil and climate here in Matakana. We also have bought excellent quality Merlot fruit from the Hawks Bay area of NZ which is known for the best Merlot in NZ. This allows us to make a quality Bordeaux style blend of wine. Matakana is located at 37 degrees south which gives us the same climate as the best regions of Bordeaux. Check out our Matakana Wine Trail and the coastal region of Matakana, NZ by GOOGLING to see what you can learn about our area here in the GodZone.!!

So that we can focus on the best Bordeaux bled of wine possible, we are proud to be working with a young Kiwi wine maker with 4 years experience of wine making in France. John Worth, our wine maker, is dedicated to making the highest quality wine and came to settle in the Matakana region of NZ when he returned from Europe. He liked our vines and vineyard site and felt our fruit could offer him the excellent quality that he needed to pursue his goal of making the best Bordeaux style blend of wine in NZ. Currently the most expensive red wine sold from New Zealand( selling in the US for $200 a bottle) is made just down the road from our vineyard so we clearly are in the correct neighborhood to meet John's goal.

Anyway, I propose to offer notes on our ongoing activities in our vineyard and with our process of making and selling wine. Remember that in NZ the seasons are reversed so today it is late summer here and we are quickly approaching harvest time. Feb here=Aug in Tennessee. Today in Matakana it will be almost 80 and it is a clear sunny day- perfect for grapes that are just turning color and need hot dry sunny hours to ripen with good sugar content.

What are we doing in our vineyard just now? Well, we have just finished bunch thinning. That is the process of selectively removing some of the grape bunches so that only the best grapes will ripen. We have also pinched off all the smaller grapes above the fruiting wire so that all the vine energy goes only in ripening the best bunches. Too many bunches gives less quality fruit and we are all about quality and not quantity!!!!! I could not do a good job of thinning as I hate to see the fruit drop on the ground under the vines. Sandra and our staff does a good job of that however and I concentrate on other immediate chores for vine management.

Birds!!!! Since we are a in a very fertile green coastal area we have LOTS of birds. We do not poison or eat them as the French often do so we net our vines instead to protect the fruit while not harming the birds. If you drive around Matakana just now and look at the 31 current vineyards you will see lots and lots of white bird netting. Our grapes are just now undergoing veraison (changing color from green to red) This tells the birds that a meal is almost ready for them. Thus we start to net the grapes. We use side netting that is very labor intensive to apply but allows us to still trim the vines shoots on top later in the growing season. In the top left photo you can see two rows of our vines with the side netting on the left row but not yet on the right.
What next? Now we hope for dry weather so our protected grapes can mature. Wish us luck with this harvest as what happens in the next few weeks determines what sort of fruit we will have for John to work his magic to turn into quality wine for our third harvest. Stay tuned to see how our weather goes. "everyone talks about the weather but no one can change it" Thus we are at the mercy of the weather gods just now.

More soon;

DR JIM :):):):):)