Action in the Cellar

This is a big week for bottling. We will bottle Oskyfizzante Iowa White on Tuesday and 2020 Iowa Brianna on Friday. When we bottle the Oskyfizzante wines, we have to wait for a day or so to apply the label and capsule. This is because both the

We are working with Edelweiss this week and start by getting Star Spangled White® ready for bottling. We will bottle both Star Spangled White in 750 ml bottles and the Christmas Tree bottles this week. We will get the next batch of Oskyfizzante® White ready for carbonation

We will bottle Oskyfizzante Cranberry this week. Because it is a fizzy wine, it has to be bottled with our hand-operated counter pressure filler. Our typical fizzy wine bottling run is about 160 twelve-bottle cases or about 400 gallons. As soon as this wine warms up (within

After two very short weeks, we’ve got lots to do in the cellar this week. We are getting a new wine ready for bottling. It is a sweet red blend that some people call a picnic wine. That will give you some idea of where you might

We have about 540 cases of Cranberry Wine to bottle this week. In addition, we have lots of cellar operations to perform. We will rack Edelweiss off a fining agent and begin cold stabilization of Edelweiss. We will also rack St. Pepin off a fining agent. We’ve

This week, we will bottle American Steuben and get Cranberry Wine ready for bottling next week. We will also be monitoring some fermentations. We purchased some barrels made from American oak that have high levels of whisky lactones. We will be ageing a special batch of Iowa

We bottle the 2020 Iowa Nouveau, our first wine of the season, this week. This is a very fruity, dry red wine that lots of Iowans consume with Thanksgiving dinner. It will be released on Thursday, November 19. Last week, we received Concord juice and started its

Fermentations of Iowa Steuben, Sabrevois Rosé, and Sabrevois Special (temporary name for a new wine) are complete and we will rack these wines off the dead yeast cells and grape solids this week. We will do the same with two different batches of Marquette. We will chill

Now that all fermentations are finished, we are moving on to finishing wines and getting some ready for bottling. We’ve kept our Marquette in two batches in order to assess the differences in wine made from vines that were hedged and those that were not hedged. We

Our last wine to finish fermentation is Sabrevois and it is almost done. That is a big milestone for the season. We’ll be racking Foch, a batch of Petite Pearl, LaCrosse and La Crescent off yeast lees. Then, we taste and decide what the next steps are.