Thursday, April 10, 2008

Finger Lakes Wine Competition

GOLD MEDAL WINNER NOTIFICATION

It gives me a great deal of pleasure to inform you that our competition held in Rochester, NY on March 29th & 30th has awarded you GOLD MEDALS for the following wines:

Sainte Genevieve Winery American Blackberry


This is the type of email a girl like me likes to see.

Monday, April 07, 2008

Driving Posts

All this rain has got to be good for something. According to the St. Louis news, we had a record amount of rain in March. Right here on our property we had over 10 inches of rain in March. The ground is so saturated that it is easy to get posts into the ground. This is a new vineyard that we planted last year. We planted a few Gewurztraminer and Cabernet Franc on this site to see if we could grow a few vinifera besides Muscat Canelli. We covered them with straw over the winter; that's what you see all over the ground. Now we are putting in the trellis to get them to grow up and onto the wires we will hang later this spring. We cut all our own cedar posts in the winter and drug them out of the woods.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Carboy of Riesling


I teach a Fundamentals of Enology class through Mineral Area Junior College. It meets on Monday nights, and most of the classes are held out here on the farm. We make a little bit of
"kit" wine since there isn't a whole lot fermenting in the spring. This is a picture of the Riesling wine that we racked Monday night into this 6 gallon carboy. It still has a little bit of foam at the top; the fermentation is all but finished. Then it will become clear, and we will bottle in a couple weeks. It's a learning experience for all, because I haven't really made too many kit wines myself either.