From Our Vineyard

Last week, we finished pruning Meadowcreek Vineyards and since Tassel Ridge is also done, we are finished with our two largest vineyards. We have also finished removing Mulberry trees in one bloc of our Edelweiss vineyard at Tassel Ridge. If they are allowed to get tall, these

Our biggest planting is the Edelweiss at Tassel Ridge Vineyard and we have mechanically pruned more than 50% already. We have also finished some trellis repairs in our Marquette vineyard. We expect to finish the Edelweiss and mechanically prune La Crescent at Meadowcreek this week as well

Although we got off to a slow start, we are now making good progress with several aspects of pruning and vineyard maintenance. We have now mechanically-pruned all of the Brianna vines and are about 1/3 of the way through the Edelweiss vines at Tassel Ridge. We have

Last week, we finished machine pruning our Marquette and shifted to machine pruning Brianna. We also continued with final hand pruning of the Marquette. We plan to plant 450 Foch and 200 L’Acadie Blanc (this will be a new grape for us) vines in June and we

The weather during the first two days of this week permitted us to continue hand-pruning the vines in the H-braces at the ends of each row. There is only one vine in each H-Brace and it can’t be effectively machine-pruned so we have to hand-prune it. We

We didn’t make much progress working in our vineyards last week. Severe weather was the problem. We have been working indoors on equipment to make sure it is ready for prime time. In the process, we discovered that some equipment had not been serviced for 3–4 years.

We are adding about 450 Foch vines to our vineyard this year so that we can become self-reliant on our own vines for Foch production. Foch is used in making Iowa Nouveau and Iowa Harvest Red. We have identified where in our Meadowcreek Vineyard they will be

We finished up our trellis work at Meadowcreek by walking the vineyard and reinstalling trellis wire staples where necessary. The vineyard crew also got ready for freezing weather by draining outside spigots and uninsulated lines at Maple Woods, Meadowcreek, and at Tassel Ridge Winery outbuildings. We ran

The vineyard crew finished replacing broken posts at Meadowcreek Vineyard and moved to Maple Woods Vineyard to replace broken posts and to fix broken H-Braces. The H-Braces are the structures that support the trellis wires at each end of a row. Jess Manley, our new Vineyard Manager,

The vineyard crew is making progress replacing posts in the Meadowcreek Vineyard. They are now working in the south part of the Marquette vineyard. The line posts in the north and middle vineyards are done. They replaced 43 posts this week and have 23 more posts to