From Our Vineyard

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

We are well into the process of cleaning up the Macrobins and putting them away for the winter. We are also looking the harvester over carefully to find out what needs to be fixed so we are ready for next year’s harvest when it starts. We continue

We harvested Petite Pearl late last week, and this week, we harvested Steuben, Foch, and Crimson Pearl.  Foch will be used in making Iowa Nouveau and Iowa Harvest Red.  Steuben is used in a standalone wine. And, only enough Crimson Pearl was harvested to make a small,

We collected samples of grapes on Monday to determine the juice chemistries and to decide which to harvest first. We also moved the harvester, the tractor and its trailer, our two refrigerated box trucks, and several Macrobins to Meadowcreek where we expected to continue with harvest. We