Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Just to show you how "spring has sprung" here in Matakana Valley, here is our outdoor fireplace and patio at out home. I planted this wisteria 2 years ago and look how well it is now flowering in the NZ spring time!!!!!

We just started daylight savings time here on OCt 1st so now it will be light late in the evenings. Remember that we are very close to the south pole and thus we get the long summer eve daylight similar to lower Canada and Europe or England. In Dec it stays light until 9:30 or so here at the summer equinox.

More on bottling soon.

DR Jim

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Well. I said that our grapes were about to wake up from winter. Here is the first bit of bud burst from that same vine that I photographed in my past blog. Each of these blooms will now lead to fast growing shoots that will grow toward the sun rapidly. Note that the distance between each bud is about equal to one's fist. Shoot thinning will be next. As the buds shot up small vines, we will walk through the vineyard slowly and pinch off any new shoots that are too close to others. Eary vine management is key to getting proper controlled growth. (no sense having the poor vine work overtime growing useless vines that will overload the work of making quality grape bunches later) Bunch thinning is easy and requires just a slow walk amoung the vines and occasionally pinching off a new shoot to keep them all easily spaced--my sort of work.

Bottling update. We are all set to bottle all of our three wines this coming Friday. We will truck out wines in separate containers early in the AM to the bottling plant about an hour away. We will first bottle our own prize Malbec/Cab Franc blend first doing 25oo bottles and then 45 magnums as well. ( a magnum is 1500 cc or two standard bottles). These magnums will not be for sale but for our own personal use and as gifts for special occasions over the next decade. This 2005 vintage is really special and thus we have made the decision to hold some for it to age. Locals tell us that this is the best harvest year ever since the first grape plantings in Matakana Valley in the late 1980's so we thought we better plan to cellar some of our goo year.

Secondly we will bottle the local NZ 2005 wine which is very good Merlot from grapes we bought from Hawks Bay. This wine is very similar to our current Hawks Nest 2004 Orchard Block Red but needs a bit more maturing. We will have about 300o bottles of that as well and will only sell it in NZ.

Finally we will have 500 bottles of Rose that taste yummy and that will sell well here in NZ over the southern summertime. We are excited to get the bottling all done and I promise some photos of that in my next blog.

That is all for now. Time to go to the beach for a Sun AM walk.

DR Jim Downunder

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ: Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ: Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

We are well into spring here in Matakana Valley. Thus we just completed a spring cleaning of our wine storage shed and decided that we had four wine barrels that we will not use again. We buy new French oak barrels for our best wine and one year old used French Oak for our second tier wine. After using a second hand barrel three years it is time to retire it as all of our wine is now too good to use older barrels. So,,,, we came up with four "end of life" barrels this week.

What does one do with old barrels? There are many choices but the most common is to cut them in half with a chainsaw and use them as planters. That is what the boss-Sandra- decided was the best executive decision for our four used up barrels. In the shot above you can see me standing by our vineyard truck with one of the freshly bisected barrels still wine stained on the inside. I can now tell you that it takes a lot of dirt to fill a half wine barrel!! Each barrel holds 225 liters of wine which would be 300 bottles of wine--a lot of dirt.

So, we have placed the two new planters by our garden at our home and put rock mellon and watermellon seeds in them. By the end of summer we should have some yummy fruit to sample with friends by our outdoor fireplace along with a nice bottle of wine.

The second shot in todays blog??? Oh, that is me hard at work shoveling garden mix from the back of our ute. (a ute is Kiwi talk for a small pickup truck -called a utility vehicle or ute for short) I am shoveling the mix over the garden fence into the planting beds where the boss is planning to get the vegi garden going soon. Rural NZ has very nice garden centers and good growing soil for sale by the cubic meter which fills up the back of a normal ute pretty well. You can get a truck load for 60 bucks which is a lot of dirt for one's dollar for sure. "Cheap as dirt" is sure true here in Matakana Valley this spring time.

More soon on grapes and bottling but I digressed this time on the blog.

Dr Jim downunder digging in the dirt!!!

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Well, as promised yesterday here is a shot of our bare vines up close as they exit winter. Note the green grass between the rows showing that our grass never dies in clean green Matakana Valley. (it is a lawnmower's heaven!!) If you look closely you can see the main vine trunk coming up and then spreading in four vines that are splayed out two up and two down the training wires. These four lateral vines are called cordons and will be the base vines for this year's growth. Our team "trained" them during the winter pruning and carefully laid them down and tied them onto the two lower wires with plastic grocery bag ties (called training wires as they train the vines to grow lateral)

If you enlarge this photo and look carefully at the four cordons that go off laterally you will see little bumps spaced about a fist apart. This is "where the money is" for this upcoming vine growth. These are the vine buds from which will spring the new growth that shoots upwards toward the spring sun. Once you get the shoots (called canes) started upwards there is no holding back the vines as they proliferate like crazy. That is why the higher wires are there--to provide places for the vines to hold on to for support as they grow to reach for the sun. These vines are our Malbec and they have wild proliferative growth over the summer. If you are familiar with the Kutzu vines that grow along roads in the American south, then you can imagine how fast the Malbec vines can grow. I will try to take periodic "timelapse" photos of this one little grapevine this year so you can see the amazing changes. Nature is wonderful and it sure is fun to watch the cycles of the seasons.

Stay tuned for more on our vines.

BTW, if you live in the Nashville area we had a nice short article about our experiences growing grapes and making wine in NZ in today's Tennessean newspaper. (Sept 15th that is in Tenn.) They did a nice job on the article but put in some strange photo of an old bald guy posing as me!!! Man, do I look ancient in the shot but the wine bottles look good:):):):):)

If you want to see the article, the link to it is www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006609150319 so check it out to add a little humor to your day.

More soon. We next have to work on our new 05 bottling plans. I will write about the hassles of trying to book bottling times when you are a microvineyard next time. (being a small fish we have to wait our turn for bottling)

Dr. Jim back down under

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ: Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ: Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Well, we are back in NZ and spring has sprung here. Our garden survived the mild NZ winter well and has lots of ripe goodies--onions, kale, mint, and radishes. It sure is nice to be able to experience two spring seasons each year with our commuting lifestyle between Tennessee and Matakana Valley.

Here on the local wine scene all our local growers are bottling their 05 wines and starting to release them to the public. We went to a meeting of the Matakana Wine Growers Assoc. last night and socialized with about 20 of the other vineyard owners and managers. There was a lot of new vintages to taste. I still had a bit of jet lag and so all the wines sort of ran together in my brain after a bit. Everyone is very happy with the 05 vintage and glad to finally be at the stage of actually starting to sell some and receive payment. Wine takes a while to reward you financially since it needs to sit a spell before being offered for sell.
The 06 harvest is looking to be as good as the super 05 local harvest. Our 06 volume was up a bit and the early barrel samples are doing well and tasting yummy. It looks like we are lucky to have started our wine making here in Matakana at a fortunate time where the growing and harvest weather has been perfect for two years in a row. The "old timers" in the wine business here say that is pretty unusual for Matakana.
Anyway, we look forward to "digging in the dirt" and playing in the vines. Speaking of the vines, ours look really bare now just coming out of winter. No leaves--just barenaked vines. Once I get my camera charged I will take some shots of the vines so you all can see what Hawks Nest looks like coming out of winter.
More soon

DR Jim --happy to be Downunder again.

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Well, this will be my last post from Nashvegas until December. Sandra and I leave on the 9th of Sept. to go back to the GodZone and Matakana Valley. We have had a fun and busy summer here but it is time to go home to NZ. Spring is sprung there and we hear from Jeremy, or manager, that the grape vines are budding and need some training for the new shoots to lay down as they start to grow. We will be busy in the vineyard as the annual cycle of growth starts with the warming Southern Hemisphere weather.

All these photos are from our last winetasting here in Nashville this northern summer which was last week. We had another sellout crowd at the lovely Mambu's Restaurant on Hayes St. near the hospitals last Tues. This tasting came with very yummy nibbles prepared by Chef/manager- Anita Hartel. (that is Anita in the top photo setting up the food for the tasting. A public "thank you, Anita" for a yummy evening. We hope to have our 05 Hawks Nest Orchard Block Red launch NZ themed dinner at Mambu's in early Dec of this year. (more on that later in the fall) Midtown Wine and Spirits on Church St. sponsored the event with us and Paul Patel the owner came personally to taste the wines and visit with the guests. Again and public Thanks to Paul and Matthew who set up the tastings and selected the other wines offered at the tasting. Do drop by Midtown to get you next bottle or case of Hawks Nest Orchard Block Red as he has a lot in stock!!! That is Paul in the photo above with Amy of Lipman Brothers standing on the right of our Hawks Nest banner with a bottle of Orchard Block Red in his hand. Paul is the shy silent type but he sure knows his wine and customers.

The two guys with Amy in the photo by the wine bottles above are also from Lipmans -this shows what good support they give to wine tastings here in Nashville. Note to Robert Lipman====your team in always there and engaged in a wonderful way--maybe you should give them a raise:):):):):):)

The final photo of the lovely four "ladies night group" are good boozers with hearts of gold (note their glasses are empty). Sandra missed the tasting this time and was most upset not to see Mary, Pat, et. al. Thanks for coming you guys and Sandra says she will certainly be there for our big wine dinner end of year launch for our 05 release party. See you then.

So, it is good by for now and I promise to get back with more postings from our vineyard once we get over jetlag next week and hit the vineyard working.

Happy US Fall to you all (or NZ spring if you are reading this downunder)

DR JIM :):):):):)