Regional Wine Taster

04/05/2018

Minnesota Bill Proposes Wine Council by Danny Wood · April 5, 2018 Wineries and vineyards in Minnesota, the state at winegrowing’s cold climate frontier and a leader in cold hardy grape breeding, could be on the way to having a state funded wine and grape council.  A bill called HF1831 is slowly...

05/31/2017

http://midwestwinepress.com/2017/05/30/indy-2017-wine-competion-as-it-happened/

Judgement Day had arrived. On 24th May, with fifty wine judges in white lab coats poised to start blind tasting almost 2,000 wines, the 26

11/07/2016

Today we started putting in a trellis for our new vineyard at Belvoir Winery in Liberty, Missouri. There was something very satisfying about punching in those T-Posts, seeing that they didn’t fall over and admiring how we managed to keep them in straight rows. At the beginning of today I wasn’t enti...

09/05/2016

A decade after Marquette’s release by the University of Minnesota, Midwest Wine Press is checking in on its progress with help from Calico Skies winemaker, Will Kimberley.  Marquette is one of the only grape varieties capable of making quality dry red wine in the colder parts of our region. The vari...

04/21/2016

Giddy up It’s an exciting time in the hybrid grape and wine world because for the first time significant research has been carried out on hybrid grapes and wine in search of defining chemical aroma profiles unique to individual varieties! The aromatics of a wine are the subtle nuances (beyond the ba…

03/31/2016

This article is sponsored by Scott Laboratories. For more information on their product offerings, please contact Scott Labs at 800-821-7254 or send an email to [email protected]  My first year of wine consulting in the Midwest also happened to be a tough year for winegrape growing. Grapes were class…

03/29/2016

Move over Sideways ! Eat your grapes out Bottle Shock ! Could this be the film that brings the Midwest wine industry to the world? Wine Diamonds: Uncorking America’s Heartland, a feature-length documentary film about the challenges and opportunities of developing and making wine in the Midwest has b…

03/23/2016

In the United States, recycled plastic lumber is starting to emerge as a durable and environmentally friendly option for vineyard posts. Steel or wooden posts are still the norm, but neither are ideal. The humidity and temperature fluctuations across our region mean wooden posts sometimes last only…

03/14/2016

Walker’s Bluff, a winery, restaurant, and concert entertainment center near Carbondale, Illinois is now trying to get a casino license, according to the St. Louis Post Dispatch.  Midwest Wineries have gone to great lengths to add new revenue streams – including monster truck shows and distilleries- …

03/11/2016

Sorry about the headline.  It was an attempt at sarcasm about Donald Trump, which is impossible. Recently, the media has raised questions about the legitimacy of Trump’s Virginia Winery. (See the link to today’s Daily Beast article below.) On July 21st, 2o15, I was in Charlottesville, Virginia on th…

03/11/2016

Several years ago, my husband and I ordered some aronia wine on the Internet. The entire contents of the bottle landed in the sink. More recently, skilled winemakers are proving that aronia makes good wine. Two of the wineries are Randy Albrecht’s Wolf Creek Winery in Coal Harbor, North Dakota, and…

02/16/2016

University grape breeding programs – like Cornell and Minnesota- grab a lot of attention. But private grape breeders continue to develop many of the grapes that are used to make cold hardy wines. One of the most prolific and successful creators of cold hardy wine grapes is Tom Plocher. He has been a…