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.