Cellar Updates

We had our presses serviced on Monday morning. Our contractor has also almost finished the installation of the new settling tanks for the Winery process water. We will grease all crush pad equipment and clean both presses. The winemaker will continue scouting to make sure that all

We need to get all of our equipment ready for harvest. The first big step is to replace the waste water settling tanks, and we will do that this week. These tanks receive and settle out solids from water used in washing tanks, equipment, and floors. Our

Although we are not bottling this week, both Red, White, & Blue and Star Spangled White are being filtered to get them ready. We filter all of our wines using a cross-flow filter. Our cross-flow filter has four large cylinders that are approximately six inches in diameter

On Wednesday, we bottled a small run of 2021 Iowa Frontenac. This is a dry red and it is the first Frontenac Red we have ever made. This wine will have a month or so to settle down and then we will release it. We worked on

On Wednesday, we bottled a batch of Star Spangled White. This past week, we also finished up the fermentation of a batch of Concord that will be used to make Red, White, & Blue®. We will next start cold stabilization of the Concord. In addition to Concord,

On Wednesday, we bottled the 2023 Iowa Edelweiss and next week, we will bottle our Oskyfizzante® Iowa White. We will start carbonating the Oskyfizzante Iowa White on Friday. We routinely check the SO2 on wines in our tanks to make sure that there is enough to prevent

The genetics in our Cold Climate grape varieties combine to present some major challenges in wine making. The first is that juice from our varieties tend to have very high acid levels. One common way to manage high acid levels is to let the grapes hang until

We bottled the 2023 Iowa Harvest Red this week and got a batch of our very popular Red, White, & Blue® ready for bottling next week. We started to cold stabilize a large batch of Edelweiss. This wine will be used to make three different wines: Star

Our Concord and Catawba juice comes in at 33–34°F so we have to let it warm up to about 60°F before we start the fermentation. This juice will become our very popular Red, White, & Blue®. We are making a dry red Frontenac for the first time

Last Friday, we crushed Steuben, the last grape variety for this season. We measured the sugar, total acidity, and pH on the Steuben juice after crushing the grapes and pressing the juice off the skins and seeds. We added Sulfur dioxide and two hours later added enzymes