We have torn apart our bottling system and replaced washers and O’rings in several places. We will celebrate the completion of that task with a bottling of Red, White, & Blue this week. Our team have their fingers crossed that everything works right. We will also be getting
Read more →In the cellar, we have two batches of Red, White, & Blue that are being racked (moved from one tank to another, leaving behind solids at the bottom of the tank) and filtered. We are receiving a truck load of bottles which we put in our warehouse.
Read more →On Monday afternoon, we will host the Winemaker’s Round Table. This will give 20 Iowa winemakers a chance to compare processes and results for making red wines from Petite Pearl, Sabrevois, and Frontenac. This is a good opportunity for all 20 attendees to learn from each other.
Read more →We are putting the sleeves and labels on the Oskyfizzante Red this week. We can’t do it when we bottle because the bottles are cold and they sweat, making it impossible for labels to stick. So, we let them warm up for 2–3 days and then put
Read more →This week, we will package more of the Cranberry Wine Christmas Tree bottles and then bottle Cranberry Wine in standard 750 ml bottles. We’ve finished fermenting a first batch of Concord and Catawba and will rack them off yeast lees this week. We will rack Steuben and
Read more →Our cellar team will apply sleeves and label the Oskyfizzante® Cranberry we bottled last week and will then bottle another batch of Oskyfizzante Pink. We will get two new wines bottled and then rack LaCrosse and St. Pepin off the Bentonite that was used to cold stabilize
Read more →We are bottling a batch of American Pink Catawba from last season. We are also getting a batch of Oskyfizzante® Cranberry carbonated and ready for bottling. And, we will be cold stabilizing Sweet Roxie Red®. One of the big events of each fall is the final steps
Read more →We will handle the final step in fermentation of our Marquette and Nouveau by racking both wines off the yeast lees. We will begin fining the Nouveau and we will run chemistries on all of our wines and add SO2 where SO2 levels are too low. SO2
Read more →This week, we will bottle our first wine after harvest. It is our very popular Blackberry Wine. We are also racking newly fermented wine into new tanks. We pump the wine out of the top of the tank down to the point where instead of wine, we
Read more →Steuben is in the middle of fermentation now and both St. Pepin and LaCrosse are just about finished fermenting. Louise Swenson, Petite Pearl, St. Croix, and our Finalés are ready for racking off yeast lees. What this means is that their fermentations are done and now we
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