Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ
Well, the wine is perculating along well and now we have to sort our our blend for our 2005 release. Our goal is to blend our Merlot, Malbac, and Cab. Franc to the best taste combination possible. How does one do this? It is mostly magic it seems and requires people with really trained and experienced palates to taste the various mixes. We are in luck as we have three "in house" expert wine tasters. They include John Worth, our wine maker as well as Jeremy Noakes our vineyard manager and his wife Lynette who in her day job is a skilled NZ tax lawyer but has a fine taste for wine. John will blend up several mixtures of the three separate wines and we will then all give them a try. I don't get a vote but Sandra and I do get the sit in for that important session and taste the wine. By this process we will decide which blend to bottle in September.

We will most likely get two separate final blends-one for sale in Tennessee and then a second one for wine to sell here in NZ. We now have 18 barrels of 05 wine with each barrel holding 225 liters of wine or 300 bottles. Thus if we use all our 05 wine we will have 5400 bottles which is 450 cases-surely enough to last us all a year!!!!! We hope to be able to offer 250--300 cases of our best blend for sale in Nashville by Thankgiving of this year. Sooooo, look for it for year end gifts, parties, and your personal use.

Anyway we will do this project next week as I go back to Nashville in three weeks and need to take back these proposed blends that we hope to bottle in September so that the pros at Lipman Brothers can taste our final offerings. I know from tastings of each barrel sample now that we will brew up some mighty good stuff to offer.


Dr JIM Downunder.

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

We picked some of our olives this weekend and have sent them off to the Matakana Olive Growers Co-op for pressing.There are 18 members of the is co-op including us as the least knowledgable . In the photo you can see the large green mat on the ground that is placed under the tree and the team stripping the olives down onto the ground. The brown lab is our son's dog-Lalya- who is supervising the work as you can see. In the background you can see helpers stripping the olives into white picking vests without a net. (we are too cheap the buy more than one net so some smaller trees get picked into the picking vests. This shows the two basic ways to pick olives. I much prefer the mat approach as it is faster and much simpler. Just strip the tree clean and then roll up the olives on the mat and put them in bins and you are done.
We strip the trees clean just as the olives turn color. If you wait to long, the birds pop in and pluck all the ripest olives. If you pick too early, you get green oil. We of course with our great knowledge of olives picked just right!! (ha)

We have 98 olive trees on our orchard/vineyard and we picked 48 trees on this Sat. and Sun. as a social event with friends helping. We got about 700 pounds of olives and will get about 10-12% of that in oil from the press. Thus from this first half of our crop we should get 40 liters of oil=160 bottles at 250cc size bottle. How do we motivate the pickers since we don't pay them? Why with free wine, beer, and food of course!!!! As you can see in the other photo one of our best pickers-Daniel- is refreshing himself with some of our primo 05 barrel sample wine. That is Brett watching from the chair with a Matakana Ale in his hand!! That and lots of pizza will get some olives picked with a lot of good times for sure. The trick is to limit the wine and beer early in the day or the pickers all fade away in the afternoon.

Anyway, we had a fun weekend and now have to decide when to pick the other half of our olives. Who would ever think that we would have way over a half ton of olives to pick? What was I thinking when I ageed with Sandra to plant some olive trees on spare bits of our orchard so we could eventually have a bit of our own oil. (the things we do for our spouses).

That leads to the thought for today.

Longevity==Married men live longer than single men do, but married men are a lot more willing to die!!! (just kidding Sandra)

More soon;

Dr Jim Downunder

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Here is another rainbow scene from Matakana Valley. I was just driving into the vineyard/orchard yesterday afternoon and saw this nice view at our roadside sign. NZ has lots and lots of rainbows this time of year as there are lots of squalls of rain and the sun is low to the north and pops in and out from behind the clouds. So,,,,,, I just stopped and snapped this shot. If you look at our sign you will see that all we are currently selling from our roadside stall are limes. When we have other fruit to sell we just hang extra white boards to announce what we have on offer.

We use an honesty stall to sell our fruit at our orchard. (No!!! we sure don't sell wine from our honesty stand.-Kiwis are honest but that would be too tempting to them!!!) I remember honesty farm stalls in rural Tenn. When I was growing up long ago. I bet you could never find one now in Middle Tenn. All of the local growers use them here. You need to remember that rural NZ is really just like rural America was back in the 50's except with better global connections such as email, sky TV, cheap phone calls, and much better food and wine!!! Ah, how we all wish for the "good old days" Well, in Matakana Valley we actually get our wish.

Sorry to sing the praises of the God Zone but that is my day job now. Those of you who have never been Down Under, you better look into a trip down to see the wonders of NZ.

More later. Have a happy Mother's Day and be sure to hug yours if she is still alive.

More soon:

Dr. Jim Downunder

PS: Note today's words of corporate world wisdom

Office Arithmetic

Smart boss+smart employee=profit

Smart Boss+ dumb employee= production

Dumb boss+ smart employee=promotion

Dumb boss +dumb employee=overtime

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Well, today was the LAST pressing of our 2006 vintage.!!!! Now the juice is in the barrels and the pulp is making the birds drunk as we spread it around our orchard as compost. There is nothing funnier than a flock of loud aggressive staggering Magpies fighting over fermented grapes . Above you can see John's Italian wine press with the grapes overflowing the top. Next just rolls the barrel full of juicy fermented grapes dripping with wine under the press. Once it is correctly positioned the silver disk at the top slowly is pressed down over the press barrel and the juice flows out into the catchment rim at the bottom.

In the other photo you can see the new wine pouring out of the bottom of the press. From there is gets pumped into holding tanks and then into the barrels. After that it is mostly just a matter of keeping the barrels at correct temps and topping them up so they are full so no air gets into the barrel during maturation. Air=oxidization= crap wine. We use only new French Oak or one year oak barrels as we are making primo wine and not bonk!!!! No storage in steel or plastic tanks for us like larger wine making people use. We will age the wine for 16 months at least so look for this 06 premium wine to get bottled in Sept. of 2007 and then available by Turkey Day in Tennessee!!!

More after we get our olive harvest done this weekend--Maybe I will digress and talk about that next time!!!

Dr Jim Downunder

PS: Now the fun part of this wine making business begins---- the periodic barrel sampling that is required to keep up on the progress of the wine. (it's a tough job, but someone has to do the dirty work)

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

In the photo you can see two our our barrels sitting outside our shed next to an avocado tree. (if you look closely you will see small geeen avos on the closest tree and olive trees in the distance) The glass pop off valves in each barrel allow fermenting gases to bubble out of the barrel without the cork blowing out of the barrel. Again, we have the barrels outside for a bit because we are chok-o-block full in our shed just now. Don't worry- it is just a temp thing until the fermenting steel tanks can get moved into storage.

Those of you reading this in the states need to rush out and buy the May 06 issue of SAVEUR. They have a very good article about our lovely Matakana Valley in it. Dang!!!! now the news will get out and we will have more of those pushy Americans wanting to move here and spoil it for us locals:):):):):)

Finally, a little update on wineries in NZ. In May 3rd's New Zealand Herald which has the biggest nationwide readership here there is an update article called "New Kids on the Wine Blocks. " It starts off with a neat first paragraph. They state in the article that there are now 550 wineries in NZ when there was only 150 in 1991- that is a pretty impressive increase I think. Here is that entire first paragraph from the article.

"The most popular joke about NZ wine today is the one about bored surgeons, dentists, and orthodontists who turn to winemaking when they tire of their chosen profession and have enough money to loose half of it by pouring it into a new winery." Man!!! Could I have written that or what?????

Anway, life is too short to sweat the small stuff-- and it is mostly all small stuff when your get right down to it most times.

More later;

Dr Jim Downunder