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