Action in the Cellar

Since we can’t engage in wine making, we are getting the wine cellar floors all cleaned and are getting bottling line equipment ready for prime time. Cranberry ferments very slowly and we are keeping an eye on that fermentation. We also ended the Catawba fermentation. We will

The fermentations of Catawba and Cranberry started over the weekend of April 11 & 12. We continue to monitor them. The big news is that a pump and motor on our Crossflow Filter burned up a bearing early last week. We have removed both the pump and

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