Action in the Cellar

Sometimes, the best-laid plans just don’t work out. We were planning to bottle small quantities each of three different wines. We got the first two wines bottled and were just starting the third wine when a bottle broke in the machine. That was bad enough but the

We have cold stabilized batches of both Iowa Edelweiss and Red, White, & Blue®. We do this to minimize the chance that if a wine is ever subjected to cold temperatures, it won’t make tartrate crystals that settle to the bottom of the bottle. The crystals are

This starts with tasting and writing up profiles on wines. We have gotten labels ordered so that we will have them when we start bottling in January. We are cold stabilizing Brianna and Rockets Glare Rosé® and, in fact, are putting Mother Nature to work by putting

We had numerous fermentations going and we monitored and fed Sabrevois and La Crescent fermentations while doing regular punch downs on the Sabrevois. We punch down the cap that forms on the top of the fermenting red wine every day in order to assure that grape skins

We are monitoring the fermentation of the Brianna by first watching the tank temperature and we added the mid-life nutrients at the proper time. We were expecting to purchase some Foch grown by another grape grower but when he went to harvest, he didn’t really have any

We are updating our bottling schedule for the Spring of 2025 and are taking care of some maintenance. Our Hotsy hot-water generator is leaking soap so we will have a new valve installed to fix the problem. In addition, the batteries in our flow meters have to

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