Hawks Nest Wines of NZ: April 2006

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ: April 2006

I have aften talked about NZ as being called the God Zone. Well, here is a photo that I took last evening just before dusk from our front yard looking out to the Pacific at a sight I have never seen before. A vertical rainbow!!! I have never even known that they could occur and suddenly one appeared just out from our window. That to me sure seems to validate the concept of NZ being favored by the powers above!!!!

The other photo shows the "cake" of pressed grape skins that have been discarded from our wine press. Sandra is pretending that she is going to muck about in the pulp with that pitchfork. I can assure you that she did NOT as the pile was buzzing with fruit flies attracted to the grape skins after sitting out overnight. ( Sandra hates bugs of all types!!!!!) We will hook this cart to our tractor tomorrow and spread the pulp out in the orchard as good fermented compost material. I bet the worms have a ball when they first crawl into this stuff that still has some residual fermention going on when it hits the ground!!!!!

More soon:;

DR Jim Downunder and definitely in the God Zone

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Well, the first of our fermenting juice has been now pressed and transfered into holding tanks before going into barrels. This is very labor intensive and can be a bit messy. (too bad we can't do it the old way with young lasses stomping the juice!!!!) In the photo you see our team. John our winemaker on the left, me in the middle getting in the way as usual, and Jeremy our vineyard manager. Behind us you can see one of the stainless steel fermenting tanks wrapped with a white heating blanket to keep the temp up so that the brew keeps cooking away.

John has his hand on his "baby"= a fine quality Italian wine mechanical wine press. We pump off the juice from the bottom of the fermenting tanks and then shovel the remaining pulp into the top of the press. Slow pressing sweezes the soggy pulp and extracts more of the juice into the bottom of the press where it runs by gravity into the white vat seen close up in the second photo. Those are my messy hands from mucking around in the juice. This last bit of juice gets pumped into storage tanks with the other juice and the remaining crushed grape skins get used as good compost material in the orchard.
Next time I will show some of the big piles of grape skins that accumulate with the pressing process. It is really a relief to see the fresh juice go into the holding tanks as not much can go wrong after that unless John has a brainfart and really screws up the latter stages of wine making. (he is too good to ever do that so now we can stop worrying about the wine and just let it "do it's natural thing") It looks like barrel city just outside our shed just now as all the one year old barrels are getting cleaned and ready to reveive the new wine forstorage while finishing secondary fermentation and then aging.

More soon from early Fall in the GodZone called Matakana Valley!!!

DR Jim =Downunder

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Well, the final bit or work after picking the grapes is to remove the netting. I mentioned in an earlier blog that we use side netting. The photo shows Jeremy taking off the netting and storing it in the big bags. I drive slowly down the rows and he gently pulls the nets off and stuffs them in the big" on the fly" so to speak. We first walk through the vines and remove the clips that have been holding the netting in place. It takes a bit of time as we have to carefully pull the net away from any vines that have attached to them over the growth season. Anyway, that is all done and now the grapevines can be left alone until winter pruning after the leaves fall off in a month or so.

Why do we use nets? We have lots of birds about and we do not poison them in NZ. Being close to the sea (2 miles at most) the sea birds pop over for a bite. In France they poison or shoot the birds. In most larger grape growing areas. e.g. Calif. there are large areas of vines planted and not many other fruity crops about to attract birds. Thus the bird to vine ratio is low in those areas. In fertile Matakana Valley we have LOTS of other crops and a high bird density with a small ratio of vines to other fruits. So lots of birds show up for a snack as the grapes mature. Grapes mature just before other fruits and thus the birds hammer away at the grapes with total focused attention as there is no competing food source just then in the season. (this is probably more that you ever want to know about birds and netting but now you are a better informed person and all knowledge is power I say!!)

BTW, for those of you in Nashville, we are proud to announce that the fine wine store called Grand Cru on Murphy Road just 200 yards off of West End is now carrying our Hawks Nest Orchard Block Red wine. Pop in there if you are in the area as they carry some really good wines--now they have another on offer with the addition of ours!!! Tell them DR. Jim sent you and ask them about out upcoming NZ wine dinner we plan to co-sponsor with them this summer.
More soon -unfortunately!!

DR Jim Downunder

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Now that we have our grapes in the shed what happens to them next? The grapes have to be crushed to open the skins to expose the pulp so that the brew can start turning into wine. On the right you can see the mechanical little portable crusher into which the destemed grapes fall before dropping through by gravity into the steel fermenting tanks. Once in the tanks John, our winemaker, inoculates the pot with yeast and heats up the juice containing the skins to start fermentation. On the left you see a shot from above the tank showing the grape mixture containing a big steel warming paddle. Hot water is run through the paddle's tubes to add heat to the brew. (it has been a little cool in our vineyard shed so we need to heat the tanks to get to critical fermentation temperatures to start the chemical reaction and keep fermentation going until the sugar is all used up and the process completed.) John also has some heating blankets that he wraps around the outside of the vats as well to ensure proper fermentation.

I stay out of the actual winemaking process and leave the science and mystery of it all to the experts. We can't tell you too much about what happens in the vats but I can assure you that the results have been and hopefully will continue to produce fine hand crafted wine. For several days the juice and grape pulp are mixed manually every 4 hours to ensure complete and even fermentation-- you could say the process is sort of like stirring a big pot of beans while slowly cooking them. John stands up over the vats and plunges the grapes manually to ensure the proper results. This is the stressful time for the winemaker as he almost has to live in the shed to ensure the proper controlled fermentation process.---not much sleep that week for sure.
Now the rest of us breath a big sigh of relief and wait to taste the newly fermented brew. All that is left to do with the grapes is to remove and store the bird netting and get ready for winter pruning after the grape leaves fall away. Thus now we can concentrate on olive and Asian Persimmon picking in the next few weeks at our busy orchard.

More soon on the progress of our new wine in vats and on the grape pressing process--that is messy but fun. (no we don't have a bunch of young girls stomping the grapes with their bare feet!!!!)
DR. D Downunder

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Happy Day!!! We got the last half of our Cab Franc picked yesterday. It totaled of 2.7 tons so we now have 5 tons of good ripe Cab Franc in our fermenting tanks. All totaled this year we have almost 11 tons of grapes now picked and in the stainless steel fermenting vats. That should give us around 11,000 bottles of good wine to sell at the end of 2007. (Remember, our wine stays in French oak barrels for over a year after it completes fermentation so we won't bottle until next Sept.)

Again we had a good picking team including Bart who you see in the two photos above. Bart is the first person that we met back in 1998 when we came to NZ to consider moving here. He and his wife, Therese, are from Belgium and run a fantastic small B and B in the upscale Parnell area of Auckland. We stayed with them then and on several other occasions as well. If you ever come to Auckland we say you MUST stay with them at their lovely AscotParnell B and B. Check them out at www.ascotparnell.com It is a wonderful place to stay when in Auckland. He even now offers airport pickup as part of their services.

Bart is a hard worker and picked as a volunteer for us both last year and this one. In the first photo you can see him at work in the grape vines. ( he is a perfectionist in all he does so his bins of picked grapes are always of the highest quality!!) The second photo needs a bit of explaination. If you look closely you will see a case of Hawks Nest wine between his legs at the base of the little scooter. He drove all the way back to Auckland with his bootie riding there--a pretty strange way to transport wine I say!!!! Anyway, thanks again Bart for you help this year!!

As soon as I recover from yesterday's last harvest I will write a bit about the wine making and talk about what happens next with the juice that we hope to turn into outstanding wine over the next 16 months. Thus keep checking this blog for updates!! Who knows? I may also have a bit to say about olive oil as we have 88 trees of almost ripe olives that we will turn into oil in about two weeks. Olive oil processing is a lot easier that making wine and one has instant gradification as the oil is ready to use immediately!!!! So,,,,,,,,, look for future info on olives as well here on the blog.

DR Jim Downunder.

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ
Well, it is Good Friday in NZ and we have had a good pre-Easter Week at Hawks Nest. We got lucky with the weather this week and matured our Cab Franc grapes very well. we got our Brix level up to almost 23. (that is a really good sugar level for this grape and for Matakana region. We decided to take a change and only pick half the lot and did that on this Wednesday. They are now in the shed and perculating. We are holding off on the other half until next Wed to see we we can get a final burst of ripening. The 5 day weather forcast is good. We used 10 hired local pickers who all live in this area and pick for many of the 24 vineyards here. They all are good and as they picked they discarded any grapes with botryitis nobel rot as some call it. The birds did not do much damage to our grapes with our side netting but they sure were lurking about the vineyard as we picked too go for the droppings.

In in the larger photo you can see the grape bins strait from the vines being dumped into the destemer after being weighed. My wife, Sandra is the one sitting down and recording the weights of each bin which is placed on a simple scale. The pickers put in about 16-18 kilos of fresh grapes and we crushed 160 bins this week. As you can see, this is all very "hands on" and thus we control the grape quality bin by bin. (we pay our winemaker based on kg of grape weight so the correct recording of the weight is important and thus entrusted to my wife and not me!!--no short weights here!) That is Jim our cellarhand tipping in the grapes in each bin into the destemer very gently.
The destemer is from France and has a rotating drum system inside that strips off most of the stems before the grapes go up the elevator to be crushed and dumped into the fermenting steel tanks. The smaller photo just shows the pile of stems that drop out of the destemer. We haul those off and use them around our avocado trees as mulch.
Anyway, we got over two tons of really good Cab Franc into the shed now and left about the same amount of plump bunches out on the vines for another 5 days--we will pray for good dry weather over the 4 day Easter holiday here. YES, Kiwi's get Good Fri. and Monday off as official public holidays nationwide. They do love their days off here in the God Zone.

All of you have a nice Easter Weekend and keep Hawks Nest in your prayers as well.

More next week. I am sorry to have been tardy with my blogging but we have just been going flat out here with no time for computers it seems.-worse than being a gynecologist back in Nashville sometimes!

DR JIM =ownunder.

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Well, we made it safely back to the GodZone arriving in Auckland at 5:30 AM yesterday. It is a 90 minute drive north to our home in Matakana that time of early AM. We stopped off first at our vineyard and found a big crowd of pickers milling around as John, our wine maker, and Jeremy, our mananger, had decided to pick our Malbac that day. Bad weather was forcast for the next two days and a few of our very ripe grapes were engorged and splitting a bit. The fear was that waiting until after 2-3 days of rain cleared the grapes would get too much damage. Thus we rushed home, showered, and went back to the vineyard and spent 8 hours picking with our team. I can now assure you that grape picking is a super cure for jet lag.

In the photo above you can see Jerermy our vineyard manager driving the tractor to pick up yellow bins of freshly picked grapes. He is the only one allowed to drive the tractor with loads of grapes as the cargo is toooooo precious for me to haul around-- I do fancy driving that tractor but at my wife's insistance I leave the driving to him when there is precious cargo on board such as these fresh valuable grapes. (in return he agrees not to do any surgeries on staff and leaves that to me!!) He takes them 200 meters to our shed where they are immediately destemmed and crushed and put into stainless steel fermenting tanks. More on that next time.

We picked 2.3 tons of our Malbac off of two acres all by hand with careful removal and discarding of all inferior grapes. One of the reaons that we can make such good wine is that we are small and use skilled pickers to hand select only the best fruit. We also do a lot of bunch thinning so as to have light cropping of remaining bunches that hang separate from each other. Our goal is to get no more than 1000 bottles of wine per acre which means we are getting quality not quantity-- just what we are after for a super premium wine in 16 months.

So, now we have about two weeks until our Cab Franc ripen. Thus we just wait and hope for a bit more sunshine and coolish fall nights. The 2006 Hawks Nest story will continue soon.

DR JIM Downunder

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

A mate of mine here in Nashville asked me yesterday what was the deal with our front label with the chimney and weather vane. If visit our vineyard, you will see the lonely chimney shown in this photograph from last fall. (those lovely golden leaves are on our malbec vines just before they drop off for winter). When we bought our property in 1998 there was an old run down home sitting in our front paddock which had a crumbling chimney. We removed the house but restored the chimney and it is our visual feature that one sees when they drive along the road at the front of our vineyard. Soon we will put a barbeque and picnic area around it. We subsequently planted vines around the chimney and added the weather vane along with a stylized hawk on top to blow in the wind.

Why the name Hawks Nest? Well, there are tons of hawks that soar over our site coasting on the wind. They eat the small rodents and thus help us out. They also scare away smaller birds at harvest who are always trying to eat our ripening grapes. Thus we love the hawks!!!!!

We are off back to NZ tomorrow so it may be a bit before my next post!!

DR Jim--heading back Down Under