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