From Our Vineyard

Cooler weather has arrived, reminding us that winter is just around the corner. Our vineyard crew continues to pull mulberry trees in the Edelweiss blocks at Tassel Ridge and we continue to cut down and remove old Edelweiss vines in the A Block. In the spring, we

We are making progress in pulling mulberry trees from Tassel Ridge Vineyard. We have a lot to pull so this is going to take some time. We are also cutting off Edelweiss vines at Tassel Ridge Vineyard. We will use the suckers that come up from the

Our Edelweiss has produced a weak harvest for the past two years and it appears that the number of older vines in blocks A & B of the vineyard is part of the problem. Many of these vines have just one arm, others have died and haven’t

We finished the 2020 harvest last week with the last of the Sabrevois and our small harvest of Steuben. We immediately thoroughly cleaned our Macrobins, the grape processing equipment we use seasonally on the crush pad, and trailers used during harvest and put them all away. This

We have Sabrevois and Steuben left to harvest but it will be a few days before the vineyards are dry enough to get the Harvester out for picking. The Steuben is a late harvest grape and because we have a very light crop this year, we’ll hand

We harvested St. Pepin on Monday. This variety is time-consuming to harvest because it is located in three of our vineyards, all located around Oskaloosa. We have to move equipment to each vineyard. We expect to harvest Edelweiss and Marquette later this week. These varieties also take

We are taking samples of grapes every day or so now and are running chemistries in our lab as well as tasting the fruit. We are also picking samples that we will take to Iowa State University to test for Yeast Assimilable Nitrogen. The results will tell

This is the time of year when we collect petiole samples (stems of leaves) and send them to a lab for analysis. We collect the stems of certain leaves because the stems are the pipelines of a grape vine. All of the nutrients in the vine travel

Veraison is an annual milestone in grape ripening. It is when the red/purple grapes change from a hard, milky-green to purple. That process started late last week in our Marquette and Frontenac. St. Croix, Sabrevois, and Foch will follow soon. Veraison also happens with white grapes. They

We have a lot of new vines at our Maple Woods vineyard and we will finish tying them to the pencil rod and top wire and also remove any suckers. We have more fungicide to apply. Because of our high humidity right now, this is really important.