Ok, I am back!

So in the recent past a lot has gone on. “What is that?” you might ask. First, we had a great Bread-baking contest and a record-breaking Chocolate festival! But that’s in the past, what’s really new?

We have been waiting many months for the return of a very popular wine, SWEETSER, made with Ohio-grown Catawba grapes. This semi-sweet wine has a unique flavor and every year we look forward to the new crop to see what characteristics it will show us. Some years the levels of tartness are very high and in some years it’s a bit mellower. The 2010 vintage leans towards mellow, but it still has that distinct sweet-tart tast wine everytimee our customer love.

The new Sweetser has another characteristic common to our naturally made wines, it has a tendency to have a bit of sediment in the bottle. We have found that when the wine ages to more then one year in the barrel, it tends to have much less sediment. As we have improved at winemaking, we have learned non-chemical means to clear our wines and reduce the sediment that occurs after bottling. But nothing replaces a bit more aging to help improve the LOOK of our wine.

Now that addresses an important point about our wine. We do not typically bottle a wine until its flavor stabilizes, so a customer tastes the wine and it stays pretty much the same for at least six months in their own wine “cellar”. But do we hold a great tasting wine until its appearance stabilizes as well? Our response is a firm “no” and the story of Sweetser is a good example.

I have had a few regular customers kid me that many of our wines are as clear and clean as any commercial wine and they ask, “Have you sold-out?” suggesting we were making wines just like everyone else. I always reply negatively, just getting better at wine making!

So, though we’d like a perfectly clear and sediment-free we hope you’ll stop in and add your comments to theirs as well! wine everytime, but you can’t always wait for the natural made wines to get that way. Those who have tasted the new Sweetser have said very nice things about it.