After every day of harvest, we have to process grapes. That involves a run through the destemmer-crusher for all grapes. Red grapes are then pumped into either tanks or open-top fermenters. Grapes used to make white and rosé wines go into the press and just the juice
Read more →The first step in processing each batch of fruit is destemming and crushing the fruit. When we are making a white or rosé, we then juice the grapes in the press and pump the pressed juice straight into one of our stainless steel tanks. If we are
Read more →One of the components of our Nouveau is Foch. We started carbonic maceration on the Foch last week and pressed it off skins and seeds on Monday. We took some Marquette and started carbonic maceration on Thursday of this week and will combine the two batches next
Read more →We started the fermentation of our Brianna this week and added the lag nutrients at mid-week. We watched the temperatures of the fermenting juice very carefully. We have also received Foch from one of our grape suppliers and we started a carbonic maceration of this fruit this
Read more →Each harvest, we invest a lot of time getting all of the equipment we need to process grapes set up before harvest. This involves getting the scales in place and being certified by the State. Then, we move the elevator and dump bin from the warehouse. We
Read more →Jonita Boyer, Winemaker at Tassel Ridge Winery, accepted the Governor’s Cup in a ceremony on Friday, August 13 at Grandfather’s Barn at the Iowa State Fair. Oskyfizzante® Iowa White won Best of Show in the “other” category and was the 2021 Governor’s Cup Trophy award winner. Oskyfizzante
Read more →We will get the preventative maintenance done on our scales and our presses early this week and then get our outside 4,000 gallon tanks washed. We will stock up our case goods room so that we can continue to make deliveries to retailers during harvest without having
Read more →Several tanks have small quantities of wine that we will move to totes for storage during harvest. We will need all of our tank space for harvest. We will reorganize the case goods room to temporarily house several Macro bins that we will be fermenting red wines
Read more →We will bottle a batch of our very popular American Pink Catawba this week and then rack and transfer a batch of Blackberry Wine off sediment. This last operation is challenging because the Blackberry Wine has lots of solids and we want to bottle as few solids
Read more →This week, we will bottle about 600 cases of the very popular Red, White, & Blue. We will also begin cold stabilization of our American Pink Catawba, rack Cranberry Wine off yeast lees, taste the latest batch of Blackberry Wine to determine what we need to do
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