Action in the Cellar

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,

On Wednesday, we bottled the 2023 Iowa Edelweiss and next week, we will bottle our Oskyfizzante® Iowa White. We will start carbonating the Oskyfizzante Iowa White on Friday. We routinely check the SO2 on wines in our tanks to make sure that there is enough to prevent

The genetics in our Cold Climate grape varieties combine to present some major challenges in wine making. The first is that juice from our varieties tend to have very high acid levels. One common way to manage high acid levels is to let the grapes hang until

We bottled the 2023 Iowa Harvest Red this week and got a batch of our very popular Red, White, & Blue® ready for bottling next week. We started to cold stabilize a large batch of Edelweiss. This wine will be used to make three different wines: Star

Our Concord and Catawba juice comes in at 33–34°F so we have to let it warm up to about 60°F before we start the fermentation. This juice will become our very popular Red, White, & Blue®. We are making a dry red Frontenac for the first time

Last Friday, we crushed Steuben, the last grape variety for this season. We measured the sugar, total acidity, and pH on the Steuben juice after crushing the grapes and pressing the juice off the skins and seeds. We added Sulfur dioxide and two hours later added enzymes

We started the fermentation on the second tank of Edelweiss last Friday and added the lag nutrients on Sunday. We have totes each containing small batches of red wine (about 175 gallons in each tote) and we are punching the cap down in them twice per day.

Processing the grapes includes weighing them in, lifting the macrobins filled with fruit and dumping the grapes into the hopper-elevator. The fruit is metered into the destemmer-crusher where each grape is gently broken open. Grapes that will be made into white or rosé wine will be pumped

We started with LaCrosse last weekend. Since the grapes were warm, we put them in a reefer trailer which we have rented for harvest again this year. The LaCrosse was chilled and then processed on Sunday. Because we have a lot of Edelweiss (17 acres), we harvested

In order to make room in our larger tanks for the incoming harvest, we will take a few days to move wine in the tanks to the smallest appropriate tank available. That will take a few days. We will organize the yeast and nutrients that we get