From Our Vineyard

With the exception of about three hours of pruning in our new Brianna block at Tassel Ridge, we are DONE with pruning for this season! We all know it’s important but it gets to be a very long, tedious task. One half of our crew will be

We have four grape varieties to finish pruning at Tassel Ridge, Meadowcreek, and Maple Woods vineyards and we prune when the weather permits. Broken posts and unwanted mulberry trees at Meadowcreek will be much easier to work on while the soil is soft and wet and we’ll

Although, pruning got stopped by the rain that hit on Monday, we should be able to finish up pruning La Crescent, Foch, and Edelweiss over the next 7–10 days. If we can get a couple of days with no wind, we’ll finish up spraying herbicide where vines

We will finish pruning our Sabrevois at Tassel Ridge this week and will start pruning Edelweiss when that is done. Edelweiss is a big job because we have 17 acres of this grape. We got all of the lime-sulfur spray applied and will now continue spraying herbicide

We will begin pruning Brianna and Sabrevois at Tassel Ridge Winery this week. Each year at this time, we spray a lime-sulfur mixture on the trunks and cordons of our vines in order to kill any overwintering fungus spores that take up residence in the wood of

We expect to finish pruning St. Pepin and Brianna at Newport Lane early in the week. While that hand work is being done, we’ll start mechanically pruning at Tassel Ridge on Tuesday. Then, we will hand prune Brianna at Tassel Ridge. We are frequently asked why we

We will finish hand pruning vines at Newport Lane this week while we start mechanical pruning at Tassel Ridge. We will also get our sprayers ready. The first thing we spray each spring is a fungicide which is largely sulfur. We saturate the trunk of each vine

With the help of nice weather, we are moving right along in pruning the Marquette. By mid-week, we will move into the St. Croix and Frontenac at Meadowcreek Vineyard. Adam hopes to be able to mechanically prune Newport Lane Vineyard by Friday. So, how do we decide

We made good progress with our Marquette vines but have a lot more to prune this week. We will take advantage of the good weather to make a first pass with the mechanical pruner and then return to manually pull out the longer canes and prune all

While some Iowa winters are relatively mild, others are particularly severe with lots of snow and more important, extremely low temperatures. The winter of 2021 is certainly one of the latter. So, not surprisingly, we frequently hear the question: How are the grapes doing? The short and