Nov
24
2009
Spring in the Upper Maipo Chile
Some pictures of spring-time in Antiyal
Jul
12
2009
Harvest Update
I’ve been lazy to write for the last weeks, sorry, but I will try and put you up to date. We pressed our last wine, Carmenere from Escorial, on June 15, last day! Now we are busy racking our 2008 blend from barrels to the tanks to make the final blends, for bottling in November some time. This year we got around 21 new french oak barrels…the hardest part on the finances!
In the vineyard, we have gone on putting compost in, ploughing and closing the soil, we had around 50mm of a good rain on Friday 20 and 21 of June, winter solstice for us. Its been very cold and wet. We burried our 500 prep, horn manure, around June 1, the manure is from our cow. and we burried the yarrow prep 502, near the animals. This next week end we start to prune.
Last wednesday we got our new egg tank!! another crazy thing, but great, we will put our Carmenere from Escorial there, so we will have to wait for 2009 to taste it. But it seems that it should be very nice and expressive, as the egg tank uses the golden number for its building proportions. This is a number ( proportion ) that we find in nature, so this is really exciting for us!We also harvested our olive trees and got 52 kg, which I took to Olave a friend and had it pressed specially for us, just our fruit, and we got 10lt of this beautiful oil.
May
12
2009
More news from vintage 2009
Well ,we pressed our first wine on Saturday May 2, Alvaros birthday, so he spent it pressing, our first wine, our Cabernet Sauvignon from around our house in Alto Jahuel. Alvaro finds it deep , full of fruit, and good concentration, now its doing malolactic fermentation in barrels , 5 barrels from our homegrown, and one barrel of press.
Monday we harvested one of our two Carmeneres from Escorial, and on tuesday we crushed some Syrah from Alvaros mom in Isla de Maipo. Tomorrow Saturday May 9, full moon we will be crushing our last Carmenere from Escorial. So we hope it goes well.
After the harvest we waited for the moon at the winery with some friends and had an asado al palo , made by Ian our friend. He started at 3 and we ate around 8 at night, beautiful day.
Monday we got the oldest Carmenere we get from Isla de Maipo planted in 1984 by Alvaros father.
Great grapes.
Our press went bad, so we are waiting for it to be repaired as we are starting to press our Cabernet sauvignon from Escorial, after 25 days of total maceration, the ones we crushed on April 17 and 18.
Today May 12 we have our first rain, so its been a very nice harvest season, and now this little rain is very welcome.
So this afternoon just before the rain we sowed our flowers in between the vines, just in time!
We are planning to get our last grapes in from Isla de Maip o during friday and saturday 15, 16 May!
Apr
9
2009
Harvest 2009
Hello friends,
I am Marina and I work with Alvaro at Antiyal. We are just beginning harvest and are going to try and keep up to date with new information and pictures this harvest. This past Saturday April 4, we started crushing our Cabernet Sauvignon from around the house. We had a terrific visit from Jordan and Jane from New York that came and visited the winery on Friday (and when I told them we were harvesting on Saturday at 6 am they were the first to get here.) Thank you both for being a great help!
This year we have three new machines a modern de-stemer ( Bucher ) and a selection table, and for us it has been like going to the moon!! Before the manual work was very heavy, so we couldn’t believe it when we took like two hours to crush, before it was like 8!!
No more bending over bins to select the grapes, and take leaves and stems out! (We are getting older so we need the help!) This year too we are crushing on our roof like we have always planned. In this way the grapes fall with gravity directly into the fermenters.
Our summer has been a bit hot, but now the nights are cooling down so we hope to get good rippening for our Cabs, Syrahs and Carmenere that are still waiting to be picked.
This year too we will pick a little Petit Verdot we have. This week we haven’t crushed but I think on monday 13 we go on with some of our Syrah.
Apr
1
2009
The Harvest Blog - new this year and very much in beta…
In the foothills of the Andes in the Maipo Valley