We are expecting a very good grape harvest this year. With only a week or so before we actually start to harvest, we keep an eye on the weather because we don’t want heavy rain, hail, or high winds. We also need to deter birds from harvesting
Read more →Several tanks have small quantities of wine that we will move to totes for storage during harvest. We will need all of our tank space for harvest. We will reorganize the case goods room to temporarily house several Macro bins that we will be fermenting red wines
Read more →We are watching development of the grapes very carefully with a focus on Brianna, Edelweiss, and Marquette. We do a full pre-harvest test using a rigorous sampling procedure weekly complemented by random sampling and tasting. When we see the three varieties mentioned above getting ready for harvest,
Read more →After about two weeks of regular light rain, we have experienced two weeks of hot, dry weather. Fortunately, we have lots of ground moisture and only the newly planted vines will need additional water if the weather stays hot and dry. Our mature vines have root systems
Read more →The first question everyone asks at this time of year is this: How is the grape crop looking? Vines in all of our four vineyards have heavy fruit loads. In fact, I don’t remember a harvest that was looking this good by July 15. Keep in mind
Read more →The rain last week and again this week has created some short days and many tasks were not complete. The top priority is to complete the harvest estimate and then to thin leaves in our Marquette blocks. We will finish removing Mulberry trees at Newport Lane, start
Read more →We will bottle a batch of our very popular American Pink Catawba this week and then rack and transfer a batch of Blackberry Wine off sediment. This last operation is challenging because the Blackberry Wine has lots of solids and we want to bottle as few solids
Read more →We will start thinning leaves on Marquette vines at Meadowcreek Vineyards. We want the fruit to get some sun but the leaves are two and three deep in places so we will mount our Collard leaf thinning system on a tractor and get ready to start removing
Read more →They say that “necessity is the mother of invention!” We need to replace 200–300 Steuben vines that have died. This variety is pretty tender for Iowa’s winter climate anyway but we have some of our Steuben planted in a very wet area that we are having a
Read more →We have torn apart our bottling system and replaced washers and O’rings in several places. We will celebrate the completion of that task with a bottling of Red, White, & Blue this week. Our team have their fingers crossed that everything works right. We will also be getting
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