Action in the Cellar

In the cellar, we have two batches of Red, White, & Blue that are being racked (moved from one tank to another, leaving behind solids at the bottom of the tank) and filtered. We are receiving a truck load of bottles which we put in our warehouse.

On Monday afternoon, we will host the Winemaker’s Round Table. This will give 20 Iowa winemakers a chance to compare processes and results for making red wines from Petite Pearl, Sabrevois, and Frontenac. This is a good opportunity for all 20 attendees to learn from each other.

This week, we will package more of the Cranberry Wine Christmas Tree bottles and then bottle Cranberry Wine in standard 750 ml bottles. We’ve finished fermenting a first batch of Concord and Catawba and will rack them off yeast lees this week. We will rack Steuben and

Our cellar team will apply sleeves and label the Oskyfizzante® Cranberry we bottled last week and will then bottle another batch of Oskyfizzante Pink. We will get two new wines bottled and then rack LaCrosse and St. Pepin off the Bentonite that was used to cold stabilize

We are bottling a batch of American Pink Catawba from last season. We are also getting a batch of Oskyfizzante® Cranberry carbonated and ready for bottling. And, we will be cold stabilizing Sweet Roxie Red®. One of the big events of each fall is the final steps

We will handle the final step in fermentation of our Marquette and Nouveau by racking both wines off the yeast lees. We will begin fining the Nouveau and we will run chemistries on all of our wines and add SO2  where SO2 levels are too low. SO2

This week, we will bottle our first wine after harvest. It is our very popular Blackberry Wine. We are also racking newly fermented wine into new tanks. We pump the wine out of the top of the tank down to the point where instead of wine, we

Steuben is in the middle of fermentation now and both St. Pepin and LaCrosse are just about finished fermenting. Louise Swenson, Petite Pearl, St. Croix, and our Finalés are ready for racking off yeast lees. What this means is that their fermentations are done and now we

With ten different wines at various stages of fermentation, there are lots of balls in the air at Tassel Ridge right now. Yeast needs to be fed at about the middle of the fermentation cycle so additional nutrients are put in the tanks at the right times.