Our major priority this week was to bottle a batch of Oskyfizzante Iowa White. It is selling very well and we have just a few cases of the 2021 batch of this wine left. Our new batch will arrive just in time. This is a wine that is becoming very popular. It is the driest of our fizzy wines and is versatile in that it can be used as an aperitif, in celebrations, with dinner, and mixed with orange juice to make a mimosa. And, it won a gold medal and the Governor’s Cup in the 2021 Iowa State Fair Commercial Wine Competition. Oskyfizzante Iowa White is made from Edelweiss grapes grown at Tassel Ridge Winery. It is all Iowa!
We are continuing to work on our next batch of Red, White, & Blue®.
This year we produced about 120 gallons of Iowa Marquette and Iowa Frontenac as part of an experiment in conjunction with Iowa State University. Our collective objective was to test a machine called a Della Toffola Maceration Accelerator (DTMA). This machine actively cuts the skins of the grapes without cutting the seeds in order to release more of the flavor and especially the color (which all comes from the skins and not from the pulp of the grape). Our first sensory review showed a significant difference between the “control” batch of the Marquette that was handled in the normal manner without use of the DTMA and the batch that was passed through the DTMA. The Frontenace did not reveal any differences, mainly we think because we were not using the DTMA correctly on the Frontenac. That is where good instruction manuals would be helpful! There will be more sensory trials and both Iowa State and Tassel Ridge will be sharing the wine with the public in order to solicit inputs on what the market thinks of the wine processed in the DTMA. Right now, we are getting the wine ready for bottling. The first step is to cold stabilize each of the four batches of wine and at the same time, we are working on labels that we will submit for approval at the TTB in Washington, D.C.
