Tassel Ridge Winery

Tassel Ridge Winery–April 2008

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Tassel Ridge Winery invites you to a Wine and Food Pairing Dinner Featuring Foods of Southeast Asia on Saturday, April 12

 

Tassel Ridge Winery invites you to a Wine and Food Pairing Dinner featuring the flavorful cuisine of Southeast Asia paired with crisp, refreshing Tassel Ridge wines.

Wine tasting and appetizers beginning at 7:00 with dinner at 7:30.

 

Menu includes:

Reservations are $45 per person and will be accepted through Thursday, April 10. Call Tassel Ridge Winery at 641.672.WINE (9463) or email dining@tasselridge.com your name, telephone number, and credit card information to reserve your spot.

Join us for Wine and Healthy Living Dinner & Discussion at Tassel Ridge Winery on Saturday, April 26. 

You’ve no doubt heard the medical experts proclaim that wine, and particularly red wine, can be good for you. But, how does wine fit in to the big picture of a healthy lifestyle? Nutritionist Katie Bogue, RD, LD of Des Moines joins us for an informal lecture on Wine and Healthy Living, followed by a four-course meal comprised of delectable yet healthy food choices paired with Tassel Ridge wines. The menu includes Rainbow Roasted Pepper Soup, Raspberry Spinach Salad, Maple-Glazed Salmon, and yes, even dessert! Price is $55 per person. Make your reservation by phoning 641/672-9463. 

Wine Release Party!

Mark Your Calendars for New Wine Release Parties April-June

On each of the weekends below, we will release the wines as noted and offer all of our guests appropriate hors d’oeuvres to enhance their enjoyment of the wine. The hors d’oeuvres are free and are first-come, first-served! Come and have a good time!

April 19 and 20: Frontenac Rosé

Iowa Frontenac Rosé is back! This very popular wine made its debut last year and sold out quickly. It is made entirely from Frontenac grapes grown in our vineyards in Mahaska County, Iowa. This wine is light, fruity, slightly sweet, and best served chilled. Consider consuming Iowa Frontenac Rosé as an aperitif or with mild-flavored meat dishes such as fish, chicken, or pork.   

Price: Iowa Frontenac Rosé in a 750 ml bottle is $13.00 plus tax. 

Future new wine releases include:

Tassel Ridge Winery Harvest Club

We are pleased to announce the formation of the Tassel Ridge Winery Harvest Club.  Members receive four shipments of Tassel Ridge Wine each year in March, May, September, and November. We’ve picked those months because they are usually temperate enough that we can ship wine without excessive heat or cold to damage it. Each shipment contains two bottles that are priced at retail plus shipping unless club members pick the shipments up at the Winery. In that case, there is no shipping charge. The average price of each shipment with shipping is $45. 

We offer two wine preferences:  

Re-orders of full case quantities of the Harvest Club selections are always priced at 20% off of our regular price when orders are placed within sixty days of the original shipment. 

Harvest club members have the first opportunity to purchase limited edition wines before they are offered to the public. They are also offered special tasting opportunities when they visit the Winery. In the future, we plan to have wine and food pairing dinners for club members only, special tastings with the wine maker, and opportunities to see how wine is made all of which are designed to make the experience of consuming Tassel Ridge Wines especially enjoyable. 

The Tassel Ridge Harvest Club is open to people 21 years old and older. Shipments are paid for with a credit card that is kept on file. 

Consider a Tassel Ridge Harvest Club membership as the perfect gift for a person who enjoys wine. One year gift memberships are available.   

Heart of Iowa Wine Trail 2008 Passport

March is right around the corner and with the arrival of March will come longer days and better weather. There won’t be a better time to purchase a Heart of Iowa Wine Trail Passport! The Passport is your ticket to fifteen different Iowa wine country experiences. You can take advantage of the fact that there are now fifteen wineries within a 60 mile radius of Des Moines and each offers different wines. The Heart of Iowa Wine Trail Passport guides you to each of the wineries while providing you with a list of amenities. Purchase your passport any member winery for $25.00. As you visit each winery, you will have the appropriate page in your passport stamped. When your passport is full, one page is removed and exchanged for two elegant commemorative wine glasses.

Purchase your 2008 Heart of Iowa Wine Trail Passport at Tassel Ridge Winery. Price is $25.00, the experience is priceless!

For more information about the Heart of Iowa Wine Trail, visit the website at www.heartofiowawinetrail.com.

Do You Want To Ship Wine Out of State?

We can now ship to the following six states:
• California
• Florida
• Iowa
• Illinois
• Minnesota
• New Mexico

If you’d like to be able to ship wine to other states not mentioned above, please let us
know and we investigate what kinds of licenses and permits we need to ship there.

What’s Happening in the Vineyard?

The big job this time of year is pruning vines. Some of our visitors ask why we bother pruning our vines. They point out that grape vines are a natural plant and that they seem to grow in the wild just fine without any human intervention. So, wouldn’t the wine made from grapes be even better if we just left them alone? 

While it is true that wild vines do prosper in the wild without human intervention, their focus if left unmanaged is to simply reproduce. So, they produce lots of seeds. Our interest is not in the seeds but the fruit around those seeds and to get the best fruit, we need to balance the vine’s ability to produce lots of good fruit against its need to survive our winters. So, by pruning off last year’s growth, we reduce the production of the vine but we also assure its long term survival. And, we assist the vine in producing fruit that will produce the best quality wine. 

We have a total of 29,522 vines which, at 550 vines per acre, is about 53 acres. 12,000 – 13,000 or about 40% of those vines are now pruned. In some cases, we are “long-pruning” which means that we do the hard work of pruning now but we are pruning the shoots long by one or two buds with the intention of returning to the vineyard in late April to quickly finalize the pruning. This gets most of the work done now while leaving a margin for a second pruning if we do get a late frost.  

We’ve pruned our second-year Marquette, we’ve long-pruned our St. Croix and Frontenac and are about to start on our Sabrevois. We are holding some of our more low temperature delicate varieties such as Edelweiss for last.

This is all a very big job since it takes 3-4 minutes per vine.

We are about to do our first spraying of the vines. This is a dormant spray based on a mixture of lime and sulfur. Our objective is to kill some of the fungus that lays in wait on our vines or in the soil beneath them for spring. These fungi include powdery mildew, black rot, and anthracnose. The sprays coat the canes and soak into the crevices in the vine so when the fungi come out as the weather warms, they get zapped immediately.  

We’ve also just finished installing three weather stations that will help us keep track of the air temperature, wind speed and direction, soil moisture levels, rainfall, and other weather indicators so that we can eventually correlate weather conditions to fruit characteristics. Each weather system consists of a sensor-suite that is bolted onto one of the posts in each vineyard. Data is radioed to the console that we keep in the closest office. We plan to connect a computer to each console so that we can log all of the weather data permanently and make it available to anyone over the internet. We will make this data available to the public once it is fully operational.

What’s Happening in the Cellar?

The rhythm in the cellar now involves three important operations:

  1. Perform final fining operations and adjustments to wines,
  2. Filter the wine, and
  3. Bottle the wine. 

Over a three day period in late March, our cellar team bottled about 1250 cases of Red, White, and Blue. This is one of the biggest single bottling runs we make all year. 

In early April, we will be bottling:

Our focus now is getting wine out of the tanks and into bottles. We want our tanks empty in time for harvest that starts in mid-August. 

Tassel Ridge Winery in the Marketplace

New Retailers

Tassel Ridge Winery has just appointed two new retailers as follows:

Des Moines: Hy-Vee Wine & Spirits on Fleur
Grimes: Spirits and More

Featured Retailer

\Mrs. T’s Mercantile in Vincent, Iowa is our featured retailer this month. If you don’t know where Vincent, Iowa is, I suggest you get out your map and look a little to east of Fort Dodge.

“Mrs. T” is Tayna Harrison. She worked for Hancock Fabrics in her present building for 22 years until they closed in 2007. She lost her job but decided to purchase the century-old building in a tax sale. The building was originally a bank, then a grocery store. It also housed other businesses over the years. As she started to refurbish the structure, she was startled to discover that the walls were covered with rare and valuable Ringling Brothers Circus posters. She kept one poster and sold the rest to Ken Hark, the world’s biggest collector of circus related memorabilia. After he finishes having the posters restores, he plans to display them in a circus museum in Florida.

The ceilings and walls are original. Tanya also found the original cash register used in the building and has it on display.

Mrs. T’s offers Iowa wine, Iowa artist gifts, and some other Iowa products. She is quick to acknowledge that she promotes Iowa and its products. She has been open since October 2007. She recently hired a bus and brought many of her customers down to visit Tassel Ridge Winery. They stopped in Pella for a little shopping on the way and then visited the Winery for a tour, tasting, and a general good time.

Mrs. T’s Mercantile
100 Arthur Street
Vincent, IA 50594
515/356-2230 

Our Hours:

In April 2008, we are open for tours, tasting, wine, and gift shop sales seven days per week during the following hours:

We are open seven days per week!

Our Location:

Tassel Ridge Winery is easy to find. It is just south of State Highway 163 on 220th Street in Leighton. From Ottumwa and Oskaloosa, drive northwest on 163 to 220th Street and turn left towards Leighton. From Des Moines and Pella, turn right at 220th Street. Drive west on 220th about 0.7 miles from the Highway and right into the Tassel Ridge Winery parking lot. view maps

Email Brian Babcock at info@tasselridge.com to sign up a friend for our enewsletter.

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--Bob Wersen, President