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.