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 →One of the components of our Nouveau is Foch. We started carbonic maceration on the Foch last week and pressed it off skins and seeds on Monday. We took some Marquette and started carbonic maceration on Thursday of this week and will combine the two batches next
Read more →We started the fermentation of our Brianna this week and added the lag nutrients at mid-week. We watched the temperatures of the fermenting juice very carefully. We have also received Foch from one of our grape suppliers and we started a carbonic maceration of this fruit this
Read more →