Although we bottled a 150-case batch of Oskyfizzante Cranberry last week, we will bottle another this week. It is a very popular wine this time of year. We will also start the process of cold stabilizing the 2021 Iowa Edelweiss. We have the same supply chain problems
Read more →One of the last steps in making a wine is to assure that there is little or no dissolved Oxygen (DO) in the wine. We will do a measurement on our 2021 Iowa Nouveau but just to be sure, we will inject Nitrogen into the wine and
Read more →Typically, at this time of year, the cellar has several different wines that are being readied for bottling. This week, we are filtering our Iowa Nouveau. We are also getting Oskyfizzante® Cranberry ready for bottling and racking Iowa Brianna off fining agents. We will blend our next
Read more →We are focused on getting our Iowa Nouveau and our white wines ready for bottling. With the Iowa Nouveau, we are cold stabilizing it by removing naturally occurring tartrates and we are adding fining agents to Brianna, La Crescent, St. Pepin, and Edelweiss. By the way, the
Read more →We will move the 2021 Sabrevois from a tank to barrels and develop our final blend of Iowa Nouveau. Then, we will cold stabilize the Iowa Nouveau. We will be bottling 2021 Iowa Nouveau in late October or early November so we will order the labels this
Read more →After each batch finishes fermentation, it will be racked and moved to another tank. The original tank is then cleaned, a process that takes at least 30 minutes. With 34 different batches of wine in various states, there is a lot of wine being moved around right
Read more →We continue to monitor several fermentations and when they finish, we rack the wine into a new, clean tank, leaving the sediment behind. We will clean the old tank out and run chemical analyses on the wine and give it a taste. This will help determine what
Read more →The first job right after harvest finished was to get the harvest equipment back to the warehouse. The red wines that are fermenting in open-top fermenters need to be punched down in the morning and again in the evening until fermentation finishes. We want to extract all
Read more →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 →