On Tuesday, we will bottle a batch of Oskyfizzante® Pink and then label and install the cap-sleeves later in the week. We will also get the next batch of Oskyfizzante Pink carbonated and ready for bottling next week. Oskyfizzante Pink is our very popular sweet, pink, fizzy
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We got started planting about 850 new Verona and 850 new Itasca vines this week. Verona will make a red wine with very prominent raspberry notes. This new (to us) variety was developed by Tom Plocher in East-Central Minnesota. Itasca will produce a white wine which we
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Most of our vines are at one stage or another of blooming. Just prior to bloom, vines have “bunches” of tiny tight buds that look like little grapes. The outer casing on each bud will drop off, the stamen (pollen producing part of the flower) extends to
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We will start the week by finishing pruning of all vines at Newport Lane Vineyard. Then, we’ll start tucking the VSP trellised Marquette and La Crescent vines at Meadowcreek Vineyards. What this means is that the canes are trained to grow upward on these vines and we
Read more →We will be pruning St Croix, St. Pepin, Brianna, and Foch at Newport Lane Vineyard this week. 28,000 of our 38,000 vines have been pruned. We have delayed shipment of new vines from the nursery in Southeastern Vermont to allow our vineyards to dry out. We removed
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We received juice to make American Steuben, Cranberry Wine, and American Pink Catawba on Monday and will start fermentations as soon as the juice temperatures get to about 60°F. Our titrator is all of a sudden not functioning, so we have to send all of our wine
Read more →We are pruning our Sabrevois and St. Croix at Tassel Ridge Vineyard early in the week and as soon as we’re done, we move to the vines at Newport Lane. As soon as (or if) the vineyards dry out a bit, we’ll continue spraying herbicide and fungicide
Read more →We finally finished pruning Edelweiss vines and moved to Sabrevois and St. Croix at both Tassel Ridge and Newport Lane. We also have several maintenance tasks to complete this week. The weather this season has made pruning VERY challenging almost everywhere in Iowa. But, with the chance
Read more →We will continue pruning Edelweiss this week. We are wondering if we will ever finish! Weather permitting, we will apply herbicide and fungicide. Let’s consider spraying for a minute. We can’t spray when the wind is blowing at more than 5 miles per hour. We can’t spray
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With more than 38,000 vines over 75 acres, pruning is a BIG job for us. We are still working on the Edelweiss at Tassel Ridge. We finished machine pruning at Tassel Ridge on Saturday and will move the pruning equipment to Meadowcreek so we can machine prune
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