From Our Vineyard

We machine-pruned at Tassel Ridge when it was not raining this week. This will be a long journey because there are a lot of vines to be pruned. We are also going through the vineyard at Tassel Ridge with a “sweeper” which is a tractor-mounted rough brush

Our vineyard crew started the week by fine-pruning the Brianna at Maple Woods and then shifted to fine pruning all of the small vineyard at Meadowcreek East. They then moved to Brianna at Tassel Ridge and finally the very large Edelweiss planting at Tassel Ridge. Edelweiss at

We finished short-pruning the Sabrevois at Maple Woods Vineyard and got that vineyard mowed. When we mow, we not only cut the grass between the rows of grapes, we also grind up the canes that we have cut off the vines during pruning. This will leave the

Have you ever wondered how vines that survive Iowa’s warmest winters fail to break bud in the spring when it warmed up? Or, after four days in mid-February with 60–70°F temperatures, these same vines haven’t started to break bud? Of course, since Wednesday had freezing temperatures and

We are getting ready to take advantage of nice weather and start machine pruning with our V-Mech System. With three people (one in the tractor and two in the V-Mech – it is officially the chariot!) we can machine prune a lot of vineyard quickly. Then, we

Our vineyard manager continues to finish-prune on nice days. Fortunately, we have had several nice days recently. He is also using a new berm sweeper to remove pruning debris and dead weeds from under the Marquette vines at Meadowcreek. This will allow the herbicide that we will

We are taking advantage of the warming trend to get back out into our Sabrevois blocks at Maple Woods Vineyards to do finish pruning. We rough pruned these vines in December. Both trucks and tractors are being fixed and we have been working on equipment in the

We took advantage of the improving weather to start rough pruning of our Marquette vines on Monday. We used our V-mech system in which two operators ride in the “chariot” behind a tractor. The tractor driver is comfortable with both heat and air conditioning. The two operators