Aerating wine is one of the best ways to “open up” or soften a big, full-bodied dry red wine. However, simply opening the bottle an hour before serving doesn’t expose the wine to the amount of air needed to have any real influence on the wine. To
Read more →We are doing oil changes on a tractor and a Gator housed at Maple Woods Vineyard. We have also started researching additional vineyard mechanization. Our V-Mech pre-pruner does a good job but it requires three people to operate: one in the tractor and two on the V-Mech.
Read more →We bottled the 2022 Iowa Edelweiss on Wednesday and will be bottling our very popular Star Spangled White® over the next three weeks. We received more Concord and Cranberry juice this week and as soon as it warms up, we will start fermenting both batches of juice.
Read more →We always manage to break trellis posts during harvest and this week, we’ll try to get them all replaced. This is just hard work. We have to dig the base of the old post out and we slip a new post down in its place. Then we
Read more →Everyone breathed a sigh of relief as we picked the last grapes on Thursday morning. The grape variety was Frontenac and both the quality and quantity was outstanding. On Friday we processed the grapes and started to clean things up. This week, we’ve cleaned the harvest equipment
Read more →One of the components of our Nouveau is Foch. We started carbonic maceration on the Foch last week and pressed it off skins and seeds on Monday. We took some Marquette and started carbonic maceration on Thursday of this week and will combine the two batches next
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
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Iowa Cuvée 220 is a dry, light red with cherry fading to strawberry on the palate and a pleasant, slightly drying finish with light tannins. A blend of St. Croix, Marquette, and Frontenac grapes grown in our Mahaska County, Iowa, vineyards, Iowa Cuvée 220 is a nice
Read more →About three weeks ago, we started to bottle and about one out of five bottles was a serious under-fill. We have a nine head filler but the problem wasn’t caused by the same head each time. We cancelled the bottling date and dismantled all of the filling
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
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