Hawks Nest Wines of NZ: Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ:

As promised here are two more shots from the bottling plant this week. Pleasant Valley Winery has been in business over 100 years in West Auckland. They have a long history and reputation as THE place to get quality bottling for small volumes of wine. That is Sandra and I standing by the bottling line like proud new parents as our freshly bottled wine comes down the small line. First the wine is pumped into holding tanks and then the new bottles are flash sterilized. The wine is passed slowly through organic millipore sterile filters to cleanse the wine of paticulate matter ( such as small parts of grape skins). Stephan, the owner there, said our wine was nice and clean and had a nice good solid color. After filtering, the wine is pumped into the new clean bottles and covered with a small amount of argon gas just as the cork is mechanically popped into the bottle and the foil applied. The argon gas is stable and inert and by being infused in the top of the bottle between the wine and the cork keeps oxygen out of the wine. This reduces the risk of oxidation of the wine with long cellaring times. We did the wine bottling this way this year as we know this 2005 Hawks Nest Red is well worth keeping for several years and we want it to age in the best possible fashion.

So, now we have 238 cases of our new 2005 Malbac/Cab Franc blend. We are shipping 128 cases of wine this next week to Lipman Brothers in Nashville and the rest we will sell here in NZ. ( if we sell out in Tennessee we can then ship more over from here if our local allocations are not used up here first.

In the second photo you can see the cartons of our newly labeled and packed wine on the pallet ready to be wrapped for shipment. Note that we are using the new style flat case boxes. These boxes allow the wine to always be stored on it's side so the cork does not dry out over long storage periods. This is another move that we instituted this year to aid in preserving the wine until the bottle is opened. We also have used better quality corks this year so when you first open one of our new 05 wines (hopefully later this year and into the future you will have the pleasure of and the need to open many of these bottles!!!) you will see that the cork is solid and will expand to a bigger diameter than most wine corks you encounter.

So, now what is next in the wine business? Well, we just sent 3 fresh of our new wine bottles to the NZ Wine export quality board. They test our wine for alcohol content, any contaminants, or poisons. (a post 9/11 USA import requirement). They also have a panel of experts on wine who do a blind tasting our of wine to determine that our wine is suitable in quality to be allowed to be officially exported from NZ. (no bad wine is allowed to go overseas--not a bad idea actually as NZ is known for it's good wines and wants to keep it that way). After we pass that test, we get a Certificate for Export and our wine is "good to go". We have the wine reserved with a "supply chain manager" (just like with medicine, you have to learn a new lingo in this wine business-this means a shipping agent) to go to LA on a ship called Hansa Sonderburg that sails from Auckland on Oct 21st. So, the wine should take 19 days by sea, clear US customs in LA, and then get trucked to Nashville. Lipmans will let the wine "rest" in their warehouse for a bit before they will release it for sale in Middle Tennessee. It looks like the wine should be available to Tennesseans by Christmas time--(hopefully it won't get lost on the way!!!)

Now Sandra and I feel relieved to have the 05 wine all settled and finished from this end. WE now will turn our attention to vine management for the 07 grapes and to keeping the 06 wine in barrels topped up and slowly aging. We have some good 06 wine in the barrels but that is for a future report. So Bye for now!!

DR JIM relieved downunder