Action in the Cellar

The supplier of our bottling line arrived on Tuesday for a planned preventative maintenance and training visit. We were excited about that because it was the first time since we installed the line 19 years ago that they have come to show us the details about its

How do we put our wine in bottles…thousands of them, each year? We use a semi-automated bottling line that with five people can fill and label 25 bottles per minute. The machine rinses each bottle with filtered water and then fills it with food-grade Nitrogen. The bottle

From time to time, we get questions about why we use screw caps when most wine from California, Oregon, and Washington, for example, is packaged in bottles with cork closures. Back in 2004 when we were making the decision about which kind of a bottle closure we

The Crimson Pearl is a small batch from the Tassel Ridge Vineyard. It has some very nice flavors and we are interested to see what we can do with it. It might make an outstanding dessert wine. We will use the Foch (which we purchased from another

We had our presses serviced on Monday morning. Our contractor has also almost finished the installation of the new settling tanks for the Winery process water. We will grease all crush pad equipment and clean both presses. The winemaker will continue scouting to make sure that all

We need to get all of our equipment ready for harvest. The first big step is to replace the waste water settling tanks, and we will do that this week. These tanks receive and settle out solids from water used in washing tanks, equipment, and floors. Our

Although we are not bottling this week, both Red, White, & Blue and Star Spangled White are being filtered to get them ready. We filter all of our wines using a cross-flow filter. Our cross-flow filter has four large cylinders that are approximately six inches in diameter

On Wednesday, we bottled a small run of 2021 Iowa Frontenac. This is a dry red and it is the first Frontenac Red we have ever made. This wine will have a month or so to settle down and then we will release it. We worked on

On Wednesday, we bottled a batch of Star Spangled White. This past week, we also finished up the fermentation of a batch of Concord that will be used to make Red, White, & Blue®. We will next start cold stabilization of the Concord. In addition to Concord,