Action in the Cellar

This week, we racked off Iowa Marquette Rosé, Iowa La Crescent, and Iowa Petite Pearl off yeast lees. We are making a small test batch of Iowa Crimson Pearl and finished the fermentation by chilling the wine. We tasted our 2021 Iowa Frontenac and wow! This is

We did punch-downs on red wine fermentations all weekend. It is a great upper body work-out! But, the punch-downs assure that grape skins are in contact with the fermenting juice as much as possible right now. That will allow us to extract as much flavor as possible

We started the fermentation of Petite Pearl on Saturday and continued doing punch-downs on red wine fermentations over the weekend. We are managing fermentations of La Crescent, LaCrosse, and Marquette. We will start fermentations of Foch, Steuben, and Crimson Pearl this week. After returning harvest equipment to

We started the winemaking process with Edelweiss this week by racking the juice off sediment and starting the fermentation. The Edelweiss was beautiful and the juice had great aromas. We also tested more grape samples to determine which variety we will harvest next and how other grapes

When the grape samples come to the Winery, we test them for their sugar level, for the total acidity of the juice, and for the pH or the strength of the acidity. We do this in our lab using a titrator made by Mettler-Toledo. In addition, we

This week, we bottled 2021 Iowa Petite Pearl and the 2020 Iowa Marquette. The first step was to run Nitrogen through both wines in order to remove any dissolved Oxygen in the wine before bottling. Then, on Wednesday, we bottled both the 2021 Iowa Petite Pearl and

On Wednesday, we canned 7,000 twelve-ounce cans of Red, White, & Blue for the first time. Whenever we do something for the first time, we encounter all sorts of unknowns. This time was no exception because after we got the run completed, we learned that the UPC

Because our labeler still awaits the visit of a technician (currently scheduled for April 25), we can’t bottle anything right now so we are getting wines ready for bottling. This week, we filtered Brianna and are cold stabilizing another batch of Red, White, & Blue®. We continue

The labeler portion of our bottling line has been down for a couple of weeks and we have tried to schedule a visit by a technician to fix it. We don’t yet know when the technician will visit so we are focused on getting wines ready for