We continue to monitor several fermentations and when they finish, we rack the wine into a new, clean tank, leaving the sediment behind. We will clean the old tank out and run chemical analyses on the wine and give it a taste. This will help determine what
Read more →The first job right after harvest finished was to get the harvest equipment back to the warehouse. The red wines that are fermenting in open-top fermenters need to be punched down in the morning and again in the evening until fermentation finishes. We want to extract all
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Although the start of harvest is 2–4 weeks in the future, we are already thinking about steps we must take to be ready. We are doing preventative maintenance on machinery and equipment right now. We planted about 1,500 new vines this year and now is the time
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We will bottle one of our last batches of Red, White, & Blue® for the season and work on getting Cranberry ready to bottle. With the start of harvesting approaching in August, this is the time of year that we start planning the purchasing of yeast, yeast
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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
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
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
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The next variety that we will machine prune will be the Sabrevois growing at Tassel Ridge and Maple Woods vineyards. Three people do the machine pruning so two to three others will be cleaning out vines that have already been machine pruned. This week, we clean out
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