Action in the Cellar

Fermentations of Iowa Steuben, Sabrevois Rosé, and Sabrevois Special (temporary name for a new wine) are complete and we will rack these wines off the dead yeast cells and grape solids this week. We will do the same with two different batches of Marquette. We will chill

Now that all fermentations are finished, we are moving on to finishing wines and getting some ready for bottling. We’ve kept our Marquette in two batches in order to assess the differences in wine made from vines that were hedged and those that were not hedged. We

Our last wine to finish fermentation is Sabrevois and it is almost done. That is a big milestone for the season. We’ll be racking Foch, a batch of Petite Pearl, LaCrosse and La Crescent off yeast lees. Then, we taste and decide what the next steps are.

On Saturday, we finished fermenting our La Crescent. We continued punch downs on some red wines in small open fermenters. On, Sunday, we added the lag nutrients to the Steuben and Sabrevois and started fermentation on Frontenac. We also racked the Edelweiss, St. Pepin, and Petite Pearl

We started fermentation of the Frontenac on Saturday. We actually harvested these grapes on Labor Day and did a week-long cold soak while it rained continually last week. We have two batches of Petite Pearl working now. The first is small and came from our 60 Petite

We are monitoring fermentations of La Crescent, Louise Swenson, and Petite Pearl and will add mid-life nutrients for the yeast in each tank. We are punching down the cap twice daily on our red wines. We are watching the fermentations on Edelweiss and St. Pepin (by measuring

Last Saturday, we processed the Marquette. That involves weighing-in the grapes and then dumping them in the elevator hopper. The elevator carries the fruit up above the destemmer-crusher where any stems are removed and the grapes are crushed. The grapes are then pumped into a tank in

The Cellar Team is testing and tasting grapes on a daily basis and we will harvest right when they are ready. Brianna is likely to be the first grape harvested. Meanwhile, the bin dumper needs to be attached to the crush pad forklift, the scale will be

We will very carefully scrub the inside of our new press by hand with scrub brushes. The scale will be moved to the crush pad and we will get a preventative maintenance visit for our Titrator. Our two new 4,000 gallon tanks will be carefully cleaned. We

We’ll be doing some cleaning and equipment maintenance before we bring our hopper, fruit elevator, destemmer-crusher, and must pump from the warehouse to the crush pad. Then, we’ll get that equipment cleaned and ready. We have a bit of wine in the tanks that we’ll be moving