From Our Vineyard

The vineyard team will start making harvest estimates for 2024. Because Tassel Ridge won’t need as many grapes this year, we will be trying to sell them to other wineries. The harvest estimate is a lot of work because it involves counting grapes in a few sample

This week, the vineyard crew pruned all 61 rows of Steuben vines and then shifted to tucking the Marquette. All of these vines are at Meadowcreek Vineyard. So, what is tucking? Most of our Marquette is trellised on a Vertical Shoot Positioning (VSP) trellis. That means that

The vineyard team took advantage of the good weather this week to plant 350 LaCrosse vines at the north end of the Maple Woods Vineyard. These vines are replacing La Crescent vines that were not doing well. The soil has a dry crust that is only about

We are now pruning ten rows of Edelweiss in Block A. These are 500 foot rows with 62 very unruly vines in each row. In addition to pruning, we are also removing suckers and tying the vines up to the trellis. Edelweiss is very vigorous and it

We finally got out into the Maple Woods vineyard on Wednesday to finish pruning LaCrosse and to prune St. Pepin. We are very careful about working in the vineyards when there is any possibility of a storm that might include lightning. The reason is that the wire

We finished pruning our Foch vines on Monday and then moved to Maple Woods to prune St. Pepin and LaCrosse. While we prune the vines, we remove the suckers and tie up the vines to the trellis. Our Steuben vines will come next…maybe early next week and

Between the rain drops, we are continuing with fine pruning (done manually) with Brianna, Edelweiss, Verona, and Itasca as priorities. We have lots of Edelweiss so this pruning is going to take some time. We remove the suckers that emerge from the base of the vine at

Our vineyard crew took advantage of nice weather and made some good progress on pruning. We still have a long way to go, however. Tassel Ridge vineyards currently extend to over 70 acres in four separate locations with 16 different varieties of cold climate grapes. We plant

We are grateful for the rain we got this week, but it did slow down the pruning. We finished pruning our La Crescent at Meadowcreek and got started on Edelweiss at Tassel Ridge. The Edelweiss will be a long effort because we have about 17 acres. We

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