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
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →The first grape to be harvested and now the first to be finished with fermentation is Brianna. Last week, we racked it off the yeast lees and put it back into a tank to get it ready for the next steps in making wine. We pressed Frontenac
Read more →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
Read more →We are updating our bottling schedule for the Spring of 2025 and are taking care of some maintenance. Our Hotsy hot-water generator is leaking soap so we will have a new valve installed to fix the problem. In addition, the batteries in our flow meters have to
Read more →The supplier of our bottling line arrived on Tuesday for a planned preventative maintenance and training visit. We were excited about that because it was the first time since we installed the line 19 years ago that they have come to show us the details about its
Read more →How do we put our wine in bottles…thousands of them, each year? We use a semi-automated bottling line that with five people can fill and label 25 bottles per minute. The machine rinses each bottle with filtered water and then fills it with food-grade Nitrogen. The bottle
Read more →From time to time, we get questions about why we use screw caps when most wine from California, Oregon, and Washington, for example, is packaged in bottles with cork closures. Back in 2004 when we were making the decision about which kind of a bottle closure we
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