Some People have asked me what we have to do with our wine (besides taste it a lot!!!) as it ages for the 16 months that we leave our wine in French oak barrels. Obviously we store the barrels at proper temperatures so not much needs to be done except to top up the barrels with topping wine with evaporation of the wine (yes, there is always a little evaporation even with a tight bung--or could that be excess tasting of the barrel????) The other main task is to rack the wine and remove the lees. Lees and racking--"what is that" you say? Over time the sediment in the wine barrel settles to the bottom and allows the aging wine to clarify a bit. If you just move the barrel around you will stir up this sludge -called lees. So, we "rack" the wine by carefully moving it from one barrel to another one. This racking of the barrels allows the aging wine to be gently pulled off into a fresh clean barrel while leaving the sediment (lees) in the bottom of the barrel. The oldest and simplest way to do this is as shown in the photo. Note we have two barrels elevated using our tractor fork lift and a simple clear clean hose. Gravity does the work as the aging wine flows down into the lower fresh barre. We can tell immediately when the old barrel of wine is almost empty as the wine begins to show a bit cloudy coming out of the elevated barrel. Of course we clean the barrels into which we are transfering the aging wine and first burn sulfa tablets in the empty barrels to reduce the risk of fungus growth. If you note on most wine bottles you will see in small print on the back the words "contains sulfites". That is because a small amount of sulfa in a barrel helps to control the fungus growth that could affect the finished wine. No one wants moldy wine to drink!!!!!!!!

In the second photo you can see the barrel washing and cleaning process-which is done for us by a contract local barrel cleaner who has all the necessary special equipment. Ignore Jeremy on the tractor and focus on the two barrels in the forfront of the photo. If you look closely at the center top of the closest barrel, you will see a black handle on the metal tube shoved tightly into the bung hole. This pokes the hot water gun into the barrel and allows high pressure irrigation and thus "steam cleaning" of the barrel. In the process, high pressure jets of scalding water are used to rinse out the lees (crud on the bottom) and residual wine. The green hose is the outflow pipe by which the flushing fluid and debris flow out into our waste drain.

We dry out the freshly emptied and cleansed barrels before reusing them. In the last photo you can see some the emptied and cleansed barrels "resting" under the big avocado tree by our red shed. By keeping them in the shade while empty the don't get too warm before we refill them with cool wine and but them back in our shed cellar. We move the barrels around as needed using the metal barrel racks that can hold two barrels. Note them under the barrels. The tractor front fork lift fits perfectly into these racks. Unfortunately I am banned by my wife, Sandra, from driving around with full barrels of wine but I DO get to move some of the empty ones. (a full wine barrel has 225 liters of wine or 300 bottles of wine so it would be a shame to spill that much wine due to poor driving skills!!!)

This pretty much catches you up on what is going on down on the vineyard in Matakana in the middle of summer. As far as the grapes are concerned they are loving or long dry sunny days and are coming along just fine. Soon we will be putting the the netting over the bunches but that is another story!!!

If you are in the Nashville area reading this blog post note that we will be back in Tenn before Easter to host two nice wine tasting events in April where you can sample some of 2005 Hawks Nest Orchard Block Red wine. ONe will be at The Watermark on April the 12th and the second will be down in Franklin at the Red Pony on Main Streen. That one will also be in April after Easter break. So,, you have two upcoming chances to taste our wine this Tennessee spring.

See you soon, but now I have to go down to the beach to fetch some fresh seaweed for Sandra's garden mulch pile-maybe I will see some of those famous Kiwi summer time beach mushrooms while there:):):):):)

More next time.

Dr Jim Downunder.