From Our Vineyard

We dismantled and rebuilt our mechanical pruner and tried it out on Monday. On Tuesday, we deep-cleaned the bottling line, power washed the floors, and got everything ready for bottling in January. Our electrically-powered hand pruners needed to be overhauled, cleaned, and have their blades sharpened this

We will continue with rough pruning using our mechanical pruner at Tassel Ridge, weather permitting. We will start cleaning out trellis wires in the Marquette. The mechanical pruner cuts the canes but many are so long that they have to be pulled out manually. And, we will

Each day, we do what we can in the vineyard considering temperature, precipitation, and wind speed. We worked to finish pulling Mulberry trees at Tassel Ridge vineyard. This vineyard looks MUCH better now than it did just a month ago. We will switch to mulching up the

We started mechanically pruning our Marquette with our V-Mech pruning system this week. We can prune two rows simultaneously while the tractor and cart are moving at about 2 miles per hour. Although the vines are already dormant, we normally wouldn’t prune at this time of year

We will continue pulling trees at Maple Woods and Newport Lane Vineyards and will be taking advantage of the ground that got softened by the recent rain storm. This is important because we have to pull the Mulberry trees out by the roots. If the ground is

This week, we finished replacing broken posts in our Marquette blocks and continued pulling Mulberry trees at Meadowcreek Vineyards. Most of our Marquette and all of our La Crescent is on a Vertical Shoot Positioning (VSP) trellis. We won’t do that again! We took the advice of

This week, we started replacing broken posts in our Marquette blocs at Meadowcreek Vineyards. We also started pulling mulberry trees at Meadowcreek. We are making good progress on moving the water from our lagoons to irrigate the landscaping around the Winery. As our vines sense the approach

This photo was taken at sunset on October 1, 2022.  Our goal is to have vines reach the top wire during their first growing season. You can see that the short vine in the foreground didn’t make it but that the two big vines in the background

The vineyard team has been putting in some long days pulling trees and replacing vineyard trellis posts. We are taking advantage of the nice weather and the fact that the ground is fairly wet at the moment. They are making good progress. This week, we started running

Because of the recent rains, the vineyard soil here in Mahaska County is well irrigated and it is much easier to remove broken posts and Mulberry trees. Posts get broken off at the ground during harvest because they get hit by the harvester, especially when we are