From Our Vineyard

The vineyard crew is ready to harvest as soon as the fruit tastes good, sugar levels rise, and acid levels drop. We are thinking that it will be St. Pepin, followed by LaCrosse, so we will remove the netting on the St. Pepin the day before we

We started picking Edelweiss at 2 a.m. Sunday morning. We put the fruit into refrigerated trucks at the Winery so the grapes were ready and waiting for crush to begin Monday morning. We will be picking Edelweiss every day until it is all made into juice. This year’s harvest

We harvested our Brianna in two vineyards on Sunday morning starting at 3 a.m.! The grapes are at their coolest early in the morning. We put them in one of our refrigerated trucks where they stayed until we could process them on Monday morning. Our objective is to

Our vineyard team will continue repairing the portions of trellis that were damaged by the wind storm on July 18. A continuing careful audit of each row of vines at the Winery is revealing that wires have come loose from posts and that more line posts have

We will be pouring concrete on the approaches to the crush pad west of the Winery this week. In addition, we will be installing new LED lighting in the cellar as part of an energy efficiency project. So, other work in the cellar will have to be

Hot, humid weather is ideal for growing fungus but not for making quality wine. We must spray every 7–10 days and vary the fungicide each time in order to avoid allowing the fungus to become resistant to the sprays. Given the amount rain, we must mow the

We continue to tie up new plants and maintain trellises in all vineyards. We are starting preventative maintenance on all harvest equipment. And, spraying for fungus is never ending. Last week, we undertook our first harvest estimate of the season. We will update this estimate two more

We will continue removing suckers and will start retying vines in the Maple Woods Vineyard. We will be using our Collard leaf thinner to remove leaves on the east side of the rows in our Meadowcreek Vineyard. Weather permitting, we will be spraying herbicide and fungicide and

This week we will be spraying both fungicide and herbicide. Fungus of all types love hot, humid weather, so we have to spray fungicide about once every seven to ten days during the growing season. And, we mix it up and vary our use of specific fungicides