We bottled Oskyfizzante Red on Tuesday. This is slow work because it must be done on our hand bottling station with five people rinsing and filling bottles, installing a crown cap, wiping the bottles down, and putting them into cartons to warm up. The wine is about
Read more →We bottled about 140 cases of Oskyfizzante Iowa White on Tuesday. This is a slow process because it is all done by hand. We can’t use our bottling line on fizzy wines. And, it is a two-step process because we have to fill the bottles, wait at
Read more →We bottled the 2022 Iowa Edelweiss on Wednesday and will be bottling our very popular Star Spangled White® over the next three weeks. We received more Concord and Cranberry juice this week and as soon as it warms up, we will start fermenting both batches of juice.
Read more →This week, we racked off Iowa Marquette Rosé, Iowa La Crescent, and Iowa Petite Pearl off yeast lees. We are making a small test batch of Iowa Crimson Pearl and finished the fermentation by chilling the wine. We tasted our 2021 Iowa Frontenac and wow! This is
Read more →We did punch-downs on red wine fermentations all weekend. It is a great upper body work-out! But, the punch-downs assure that grape skins are in contact with the fermenting juice as much as possible right now. That will allow us to extract as much flavor as possible
Read more →We started the fermentation of Petite Pearl on Saturday and continued doing punch-downs on red wine fermentations over the weekend. We are managing fermentations of La Crescent, LaCrosse, and Marquette. We will start fermentations of Foch, Steuben, and Crimson Pearl this week. After returning harvest equipment to
Read more →We started the winemaking process with Edelweiss this week by racking the juice off sediment and starting the fermentation. The Edelweiss was beautiful and the juice had great aromas. We also tested more grape samples to determine which variety we will harvest next and how other grapes
Read more →When the grape samples come to the Winery, we test them for their sugar level, for the total acidity of the juice, and for the pH or the strength of the acidity. We do this in our lab using a titrator made by Mettler-Toledo. In addition, we
Read more →Making wine is like painting: you spend a lot of time cleaning and preparing surfaces before you paint. When making wine, you spend a lot of time cleaning and preparing equipment before you make wine. This year is no different. We’ll get the presses and the crush
Read more →This week, we bottled 2021 Iowa Petite Pearl and the 2020 Iowa Marquette. The first step was to run Nitrogen through both wines in order to remove any dissolved Oxygen in the wine before bottling. Then, on Wednesday, we bottled both the 2021 Iowa Petite Pearl and
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