Texas Wine Teaser - Drew Tallent скачать в хорошем качестве

Texas Wine Teaser - Drew Tallent

Texas Wine Teaser - Follow us online @   / robertclayvineyards   There have been many people that have helped us with our transition into the Texas Wine business. Drew Tallent and his wife Laura have been a huge inspiration to us and have taken us under their wings. We hope you enjoy this short teaser about Drew as much as we do! He is a wonderful man and role model. We are very blessed to have him and his wife as part of our new life journey. Stay tuned...there is more to come! So much of the Hill Country is dreamers. Most people want to be in the wine business, and as soon as they get a little dose of the vineyard they don't want anything to do with it. If they could just buy the fruit somewhere and be in the wine business that's what they'd want to do. Wine growing is a lifestyle as well as an occupation. We're in it for real. We got harvesters, we got sprayers, we got the equipment, we are doing this. We had been peanut farming and cotton farming and things like that for years, as time goes by those things become less profitable and more problematic. We current grow grapes primarily for Becker Vineyards, we also grow for Grape Creek, Texas Hills, and William Chris. We're in the grape growing business, in a big way. We have the highest producing vineyard in the Texas Hill Country region now. The grapes took off growing that first year and it looked like they liked the soil, the next year we planted 18 acres we won several silver medals from the wine that was made with that. I got really enthused, I was on to something now, we know what we're doing, turned out we had a lot to learn. We have so many nemesis in this business it is hard to describe, other regions may have some of these problems but they don't have them all. We can have them all in the same year, spring frost, hail, if your not flexible and willing to change you're going to have lots of problems. My family has been here for 4 generations, I'm a 4th generation farmer and rancher. I came back to run the family farm when my dad retired. and I decided I had enough of the city. I think the reason a lot of people are getting into this industry now is to escape the cities and get into the rural lifestyle and get away from the traffic and all the other things. We frequently have lots of people ask us and tell us that they are interested in getting into the grape business, and usually they are not very sincere and its easy to waste a lot of time talking to someone that is not really going to actually become involved in this industry. I met Dan McLaughlin somewhat by accident and have been working with him to help him establish his vineyard. It was one of those things where I knew what he was up against, where he was. I had been to the Buist Vineyard so, when I met him the first time he was out in the vineyard working and that was a pretty good sign, so we went from there. Grape growing is a very serious proposition it requires a lot of dedication, it's not nearly so romantic as it is just hard work. My favorite time is the harvest, because that means we're almost finished! We're a believer in the machine harvest. It's a pretty interesting machine and how it works it sorts out and blows all the leaves off, it sucks out all the leaves out of the fruit and cleans it us. Hand picking is very very slow, its very inconsistent, it's hard to get people trained, and then you cant keep them after you train them. we did fifteen tons of fruit in about two and a half hours. That's a lot to pick by hand and stick in a bucket. It takes fifteen hundred gallons of water to wash it after the harvest. After weighing they're taken and dumped into a de-stemmer/crusher and then that all goes into the tank to fermentation. If they are a red grape they will be in that steel tank probably two and a half maybe 3 weeks, and when the fermentations are all finished then they go to barrels. We've continued to grow and expand and the medals have kept coming and the wineries like our fruit, so were going to be in it for the duration I guess. A special thanks goes out to ProductionFor (http://www.productionfor.com) for their efforts in capturing our journey and that of Texas Wine!