Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

Hawks Nest Wines of NZ

As I promised earlier in a blog I will keep taking photos of one specific grape vine near our driveway at Hawks Nest so you can follow the seasonal changes of the vine. Today's shot shows some interesting little tiny bunches forming on the stems of the shoots of the vines. No, those are not little grapes alreadly forming. (I made that mistake the first year as we were watching the vines grow in the our first spring and our staff just laughed at me- the neophyte.) These little green bunches are the first budding of the flowers that will soon form to attract the bees to begin pollination. Yes, they do look like very minature grape bunches but that will soon change. The grapes actually form later in the summer.

All is well at the red shed of our winery and we got our last bit of 05 fermenting juice into cleaned barrels yesterday and all the wine is now settled to have slow aging in oak. We used 28 barrels for our 06 wine. Each barrel holds 225 liters or about 300 bottles of finished wine so we have 6300 liters aging now. That is 700 cases of 06 wine if we use and bled it all for release. That is a lot of good wine so we hope you will start to up you volume of intake for Hawks Nest Orchard Block Red Wine!!! :):):)

It is Fri afternoon and I am about to knock off for the weekend. Next we I will start offering samples of our new rose, 05 Merlot, and export 05 Cab Franc/Malbec blend to several local cafes and B and B's. It will have been four weeks since we bottled on next Thursday so that will be my first day to go around the valley and start to sell our wine. It will be really good to get some feedback from locals who have not yet tasted our export quality wine. (last year we sent all our best wine to Nashville so no one here got to taste what you have and can taste in Tennessee now-our small amount of remaining 04)

More next week on my initial sales attempts here for our new wines.

Dr Jim =still downunder