We got started planting about 850 new Verona and 850 new Itasca vines this week. Verona will make a red wine with very prominent raspberry notes. This new (to us) variety was developed by Tom Plocher in East-Central Minnesota. Itasca will produce a white wine which we
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Most of our vines are at one stage or another of blooming. Just prior to bloom, vines have “bunches” of tiny tight buds that look like little grapes. The outer casing on each bud will drop off, the stamen (pollen producing part of the flower) extends to
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We will start the week by finishing pruning of all vines at Newport Lane Vineyard. Then, we’ll start tucking the VSP trellised Marquette and La Crescent vines at Meadowcreek Vineyards. What this means is that the canes are trained to grow upward on these vines and we
Read more →We will be pruning St Croix, St. Pepin, Brianna, and Foch at Newport Lane Vineyard this week. 28,000 of our 38,000 vines have been pruned. We have delayed shipment of new vines from the nursery in Southeastern Vermont to allow our vineyards to dry out. We removed
Read more →We are pruning our Sabrevois and St. Croix at Tassel Ridge Vineyard early in the week and as soon as we’re done, we move to the vines at Newport Lane. As soon as (or if) the vineyards dry out a bit, we’ll continue spraying herbicide and fungicide
Read more →We finally finished pruning Edelweiss vines and moved to Sabrevois and St. Croix at both Tassel Ridge and Newport Lane. We also have several maintenance tasks to complete this week. The weather this season has made pruning VERY challenging almost everywhere in Iowa. But, with the chance
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With more than 38,000 vines over 75 acres, pruning is a BIG job for us. We are still working on the Edelweiss at Tassel Ridge. We finished machine pruning at Tassel Ridge on Saturday and will move the pruning equipment to Meadowcreek so we can machine prune
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We expect to apply the annual lime-sulfur spray to the vine trunks and cordons. The objective is to kill any fungus that overwintered in cracks in the trunks and cordons. This spray is commonly also applied to fruit trees. We also expect to start spraying herbicide to
Read more →The next variety that we will machine prune will be the Sabrevois growing at Tassel Ridge and Maple Woods vineyards. Three people do the machine pruning so two to three others will be cleaning out vines that have already been machine pruned. This week, we clean out
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Last week and in spite of very muddy conditions, the vineyard crew finished pruning our nine acre Marquette vineyard and the one acre of vines in our test plot at Meadowcreek East. The first step was to go through the vineyard with our mechanical pruner. We did
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