Archive for the ‘Work in the Winery’ Category

A quick recap of the 2013 “Growing Season”

Tuesday, November 12th, 2013

“Fall 2013” is just about done for us! It has been a long time since I sat down behind the keyboard to make a blog post. I left you back on March 8th 2012, a lot happened since then. That year we had a bumper grape crop and bust of a corn maze. In 2013 we had just the opposite. If you watch the video I posted from the last post those grape buds made it just fine, then the fears I had in 2012 hit us in 2013 and we lost over 95% of our grape crop. The good news is the corn maze had the best crop ever which made for an awesome maze and a overall great “Fall”!

I took this picture of a full moon rising over they vineyard Friday May 28th as I left the corn maze field after working ground to get ready to plant it the next day.

Bad Moon Rising

Bad Moon Rising

That was not a welcome sight to me knowing what a sky can do like that when High pressure weather patterns arrive in late May. I figured we’d have a bad frost but no idea HOW bad. When my wife left the winery at 11:30pm that night there was already a light frost on the window of her vehicle.

Grape vines morning after a freeze

Grape vines morning after a freeze

The feeling a farmer gets when they look at a crop like in the one in the picture above is hard to describe. There are a lot easier ways to “make a living” but I wouldn’t trade what I do for anything. You just sorta learn things like this happen and you try and maintain a “long view” and find the positive. My father in law also lost 17 acres of sweet corn that night, but he took a gamble on trying to put some corn out in “low ground” that grows awesome crops and got burned.

Close up of "fried" grape vines

Close up of "fried" grape vines

The “Big Picture” you just keep telling yourself and keep on swimming as Dory would say (aka Finding Nemo). That same day I took the pictures of the fried grapes I loaded the corn planter and got busy planting the 2013 corn maze. We had already started getting fall campfire/corn maze reservations back in April and I needed to start getting ready.

Loading the Corn Planter

Loading the Corn Planter

I like to plant the corn a bit later than you normally would so that it stays green as long as possible into the fall season for purposes of the maze. This worked well this year and I will get back to that with future blog posts just on how we do the corn maze.

Looking over the hood while planting corn

Looking over the hood while planting corn

The corn maze growing season really had its ups and downs. I have done a lot of work to the corn maze field and it paid off this year. We fixed some drainage problems and have been on a steady annual program of applying cow manure to help with both fertility and organic matter.

But the sun came up each and every morning!

But the sun came up each and every morning!

But the sun came up each and every morning! One of the reasons I do what I do is this is my view from my “office”. People work all year to get to a “place like this”, I live it everyday. Besides all the “normal” stuff we do we also embarked on a other special projects designed to make our fall destination a one of kind place and over this winter I’ll try and review the year both in projects and all the special events we do.

Thank you for stopping by, I hope you enjoy your trip to our farm as I cover some of the things we do.

Wine Bottling, a very basic look

Saturday, May 16th, 2009
Maize Valley Reisling Wine Lable

Maize Valley Reisling Wine Lable

As I have mentioned before we are a small scale working farm and winery. Our equipment is not real fancy or state of the art, but it gets the job done for now. Many of the blog posts are just responses to questions I have been asked over the years. I try and think about what people tend to ask me then I write and shoot video of it.

In an earlier Blog posting I showed an overview or the bottling system we currently use. Today I broke it down more to show more of the individual steps we use in getting the wine from storage to the bottle.

Speaking of bottle, Boy do I have big news to share for next week with the results of the Ohio Wine Competition. I can’t say how it turned out but lets’ just say we are very happy!

Thanks for stopping by!!

Later

“>

Bottling wine Today & Buying “Local”

Friday, May 8th, 2009
Grapes

Grapes

We are just a little winery in the scope of the big dogs but the winery does help to make us more of a “Muscular” Agri-Tourism destnation. Ohio wine and more is just the story of a family farm, farm market and now winery “keeping it real” down on the farm.

On Wednesday my brother-in-law Todd assembled the crew and we put some wine in a bottle. Some of the wine they are bottling today is the first actual full run of our estate grown fruit from the summer of 08′. As I have mentioned we take a very broad look at our agricultural business. From growing peppers, melons, sweet corn and more to operating corn mazes and now producing and direct selling wine also. We farm about 700 acres still, down from about 3,000 8 years ago. It is plenty to keep us busy as you can see by the diversity of my posts.

When it comes to the wine part we first have the customer in mind. We produce what we perceive they desire. We measure that desire by what they like to buy. We are an Ohio winery that grows its own fruit, buys some Ohio local fruit and or sources the right fruit for the right wine where ever we find the best raw materials. There is no point in making a class of products that do not meet our guests expectations only to say that we grow it ourselves or sourced the inputs local. That is why we do not grow hardly any red grapes to be made into traditional Big Bold Dry Red wines. You are just at a competitive disadvantage when entering the marketplace. With limited resources we have to be careful where we chose to compete. So that is how we make variety selections when choosing what to grow or what to try and source local.

We buy local Elk meat from a local grower, local eggs from a man up the street, and we are soon to get in local goat cheese from a lady up in Ravenna. In addition to that we grow way too many veggies most years too, and many of our other packaged products are Ohio Proud partners. We hope to pair these products with our wine selections we produce and vertically integrate that into on site food sales in our cafe’. In order for us to remain competitive and have the largest positive economic footprint we can on our community we try a juggle a wide range of products and services for our guests.

I guess all I am saying is please buy local where it makes sense and your producer is trying to produce the best product possible to fit the need you have. Don’t buy local just because it is just “Local”. It’s about the competition, it makes us all better. Buy local from the vendor that uses it to balance their approach to the marketplace in such a way that they help to “bridge the gaps” that have the greatest impact on their community. Buy local from the marketer that has a vision and goals large enough to produce enough economic activity that they can sponsor the local kids’ sports team, can buy at the 4-H sale at the county fair, or have the ability to endow a college scholarship at the hometown high school.

Video of some last spring season vine pruning

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Finishing up the winter pruning

Finishing up the winter pruning

Here is Todd Vaughan the Wine Maker at Maize Valley doing some late season vine pruning. He is finishing up some work on our French American Variety “LaCrescent”. It is hearty white grape that is good to temperatures down to about 20 degrees below zero F.

Todd “Z” winemaker in the vineyard

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

Todd getting our vines ready to Rock and Roll

Todd getting our vines ready to Rock and Roll

Hey check it out Todd our winemaker is almost done with our spring grape pruning. Actually Todd has been great doing almost all of the field work this spring. I killed the weeds, he knocked down the hard work of cutting the wood! I actually shot a bit of video with him working with a little of the how-to’s but it did not want to load so I hope to have that up next week.

Basically what Todd is doing is cutting back some of last years growth and getting ready for this years blooms. We waited a bit longer this year to do some of this work because it got so darn cold last year we were not sure how much “die back” we had so we waited till closer to bud break, now we hope they slow down because we are not out of the woods yet for a frost ane we don’t need those tender little buds hanging out without a coat on!!

Stay tuned for the video,

Later

FunTSAR

New Winery Equipment!! Chaa, dude….

Monday, April 6th, 2009

My 1952 Ford F5 work truck

My 1952 Ford F5 work truck


It’s Monday and it’s cold and it is trying to snow! So what makes you feel better than getting new stuff!! Thanks to all our wonderful old customers, and all the new ones too! Demand for Maize Valley wines have been really strong this spring so in order to keep up we had to upgrade and get a new wine chiller. Todd “Z” winemaker (we say, “Z” so we sound all fancy and french like, yea that’s us) has hammer in hand and is getting at his new toy! Todd does a way cool, good job making awesome wines and this can really help out more and make the wine chilling process go much smoother.

The chiller is used in the wine making process to “freeze” the wine or at least hold it at a low enough temperature for a period of time to get the solids that are in the wine to precipitate or “fall out” of the suspension. Mostly we are trying to get the tartaric crystals to fall out in our bulk tanks so they don’t end up in the bottom of the bottle. Native American grapes (Niagara, Concord, Catawba) tend to create a great deal of these crystals and are very prone to ending up with them in the bottom of the bottle especially if the wine goes through a number of cooling and warming cycles before it is enjoyed.

It depends upon the type of wine you are drinking as to the benifits or perceived problems these crystals in the wine create. Follow the link above to learn more.

Saturday I was happy to get out and finish up spraying the grapes that were ready for this summers weed crop. Weeds like death and taxes are sure to come. We still have some more grafted grapes to uncover yet to spray later. We try and not use any more crop protection products than we have to, but after I had to weed eat 7 acres of grapes for 3 days in the 90 degree heat of August last year I am NOT going to let our lovely little vines get choked by some nasty ole’ weeds!! I also cared for the Raspberries and Apple trees too.

That is all the wine news today, the more probably deals with Galen chasing a would be thief from our old dairy farm as he was trying to make off with some our our bakery racks we had in storage. Probably after the aluminum, as some copper pipe was also gathered near the door.

Also working on the trucks for our upcoming “Farmers’ Market” season too. Putting a new canopy system on my 52′ Ford F5 I think it is going to be way cool.

For me the FunTSAR Monday like many of you involves getting after new marketing ideas, ad approval and all that paper work stuff. My wife and I woke at 2:30am to hear our son Brett playing “Monster Jam” on the Wii! He is autistic but does very well, however he can’t tell between 2:30 & 6:30 he just thought it was time to get up and thought he would get a game in or two before school. Needless to say nobody got back to sleep very well after that for some reason, and he is home with a cold today from school.

Well gotta go and stop by grandma’s and pick up Brett and take him home so he can catch some ZZZZZZ’s, maybe I can too!

Hakuna Matata