Hawks Nest Wines of NZ: Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ:

Well, today I became an expert on wine bottling. (see one, do one, then teach one we always say in medicine).
Early this AM the wine tanker truck with 5 separate storage transport containers inside the tanker came to our winery. The back of the truck can be seen in the photo with the white labels above the 5 tank valves visible. It turns out to be pretty simple to the casual observer that I was today. John, our wine maker carefully pumps off each barrel (one barrel=225 liters of wine) into the correct tanks ( that is him in dark sweater holding the pump handle down in one wine barrel sucking out the last of the goodies) and oversees the proper labeling and mixing for the blends of wine. (60/40 is our US export Orchard Block Red Malbec/Cab Franc blend and he got it right today) We trucked off 400 liters of rose, double that for our NZ Hawks Bay Merlot 05 wine that we will sell only in NZ, and then the liters for our valuable export blend of our Malbac/Cab Franc.

We loaded up the wine shipping pallets on the back of our ute and followed the tanker about an hour south to the contract bottler-Pleasant Valley Winery. ( we had to get special plastic new pallets for shipping our wine to the states as no wood or straw is allowed into America as packing material-it is good to know that the US works to keep the bugs and pests out) Pleasant Valley is in a lovely valley west of Auckland and have been in business for 110 years and specialize in small volume runs of careful bottling, labeling, and packing for shipping.

In the next blog, I will show some shots from the bottling line. We noted several very famous and hard to get NZ wines sitting around in the bottling warehouse so we felt happy having our wine "share space" with some well known quality NZ wines. Maybe soon our wine will also be know as one of NZ's small quality vineyards. That is one reason that this year we are keeping some of our export wine back here in NZ to sell. We want to show the area locals what we can do with wine from our grapes and we also wanted to enter our wine in some tasting competitions. To be able to enter a NZ wine tasting event the wine has to actually be commercially available for sale in NZ. So, now we can see if we can do well in winetasting events and maybe get some of those little stars to stick on our labels. I suggested to Sandra we just buy some little gold and silver stars in a kids party store here and put them on our bottles without the trouble of entering tasting events but she nixed that right away-just joking:):):)

Anyway, now I can talk intelligently about bottling wine at future wine events that I host as I have "been there and done that"

Now we have to get this good wine on a boat to Tennessee!!! Look for the wine there in about two months if it is not a slow boat!!

Dr Jim. still downunder

More soon