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 heads, got help and replacement parts from the supplier of the bottling line, and thoroughly cleaned and rebuilt all nine filling heads.  That was a big job! Last week, we tried the bottling line out on a short run of 250 cases and for the next several weeks will be bottling lots of Red, White, & Blue®.

This week, we plan to bottle about 700 cases of our very popular Red, White, & Blue. We will get batches of Blackberry, Concord, and Catawba ready for bottling. We are working on blending In the Dark and 2019 Iowa Marquette and we are also working on a new varietal wine made with St. Pepin.

Finally, we’ll continue with our cellar maintenance schedule by cleaning all of our ball valves and replacing the seals on our butterfly valves that are used throughout the Winery.