Action in the Cellar

We are working with the Midwest Grape & Wine Industry Institute at Iowa State University on evaluating a machine used in processing grapes.  It is called a Della Toffola Maceration Accelerator.  We pump the Must (juice, grape skins, and seeds) through this machine and it cuts the

Our Cellar Team will bottle and label Sweethearts Rosé and also will bottle Rockets Glare Rosé this week. The Sweethearts Rosé is only 20 cases but it is all done by hand because the bottle won’t fit in the bottling line. Even the label has to be

Our major priority this week was to bottle a batch of Oskyfizzante Iowa White.  It is selling very well and we have just a few cases of the 2021 batch of this wine left. Our new batch will arrive just in time. This is a wine that

Although we bottled a 150-case batch of Oskyfizzante Cranberry last week, we will bottle another this week. It is a very popular wine this time of year. We will also start the process of cold stabilizing the 2021 Iowa Edelweiss. We have the same supply chain problems

One of the last steps in making a wine is to assure that there is little or no dissolved Oxygen (DO) in the wine. We will do a measurement on our 2021 Iowa Nouveau but just to be sure, we will inject Nitrogen into the wine and

Typically, at this time of year, the cellar has several different wines that are being readied for bottling. This week, we are filtering our Iowa Nouveau. We are also getting Oskyfizzante® Cranberry ready for bottling and racking Iowa Brianna off fining agents. We will blend our next

We are focused on getting our Iowa Nouveau and our white wines ready for bottling. With the Iowa Nouveau, we are cold stabilizing it by removing naturally occurring tartrates and we are adding fining agents to Brianna, La Crescent, St. Pepin, and Edelweiss. By the way, the

We will move the 2021 Sabrevois from a tank to barrels and develop our final blend of Iowa Nouveau. Then, we will cold stabilize the Iowa Nouveau. We will be bottling 2021 Iowa Nouveau in late October or early November so we will order the labels this

After each batch finishes fermentation, it will be racked and moved to another tank. The original tank is then cleaned, a process that takes at least 30 minutes. With 34 different batches of wine in various states, there is a lot of wine being moved around right