Bridge to Brigadoon

Welcome to our first quarterly newsletter. After 7 years of scurrying around, all 3 of us, at a rapid pace trying to cover all the bases, guess what? We’re still scurrying around. We are, however moving forward slow but steady. Our “Bridge to Brigadoon” will be our avenue to keep you up to date on what is happening at Brigadoon. We’d like to thank all of our customers, especially those of you who keep coming back. Whether you’re a 1st timer, repeat or haven’t yet arrived, we want your visit here to be an enjoyable one. As we stated on our home page, this is a lifetime of work and will take more than a lifetime to be realized. My husband and I hope to hand it on one day to our kids while we sit under one of the many trees that we have planted with our glass of wine in hand and continue to visit with you.

What's New in the Vineyard

As many of you know, 5 years ago we planted 5 acres of cold climate grapes. Due to our early and late frost here in the north, we’ve had to tweak what we do a bit. We started by purchasing a fantastic pump that operates off the PTO of the tractor, which will handle 10 overhead sprinklers. We installed underground piping to the large vineyard but not the small vineyard. When it hits 32 degrees, we flip a switch and the sprinklers do the rest. This spring in the small vineyard where we planted Sabrevois and Brianna, our hose froze on May 28th and we lost all the canes. So 5 years of work is a total do over and we decided not to. We have other plans. In the large vineyard we planted: Prairie Star, ES 6 16 30, Frontenac Gris, St. Pepin and La Crescent. Of these varieties we are eliminating St. Pepin and La Crescent. So as you can see we are still in the experimental stages, hence a lifetime of work. We have plans for the planting of two other varieties that we’ll talk about at a later date. So far this season, even with the extreme humidity of last week, our spray program appears to have worked. We only have one vine with something that we need to identify that seems to be isolated to that one vine. So far things look good for this year’s harvest. It’s never a sure thing, however, until the grapes are off the vine. We’re off to a late start with the late set in of spring. We seemed to go from winter to summer overnight so the grapes are a little behind in size. So we’re hoping for a dry, hot fall. As for the critters, the first year of planting we had mice problems and the 2nd year we had problems with rabbits. This means that our 5-year-old vines are actually only 3-year-old vines. We have solved those two problems. Live and learn, and learn and learn…

Equipment

OH to have everything state of the art! Each year we try to purchase something. This past winter David installed the new filtration system. This is a real time saver for us. We spent this past winter’s bottling working the bugs out. This year we will be purchasing a new pump that will also speed things up in the filtering process. Looming ahead of us is the need to upgrade to 500 gallon Stainless Steel fermentation equipment. In about two years we will need crushing and destemming equipment. And I could go on and on. We’ll fill you in as it happens.

What's New

We’re excited about the 7 wines that we have recently entered in two competitions. We entered 4 wines in the State Fair professional wine contest and won 2 silver and 2 bronze medals. The silver is for Autumn Fire and Raspberry. The bronze were for previous award winners, Blackberry and Good Old Summertime. In the Mid-American Wine Competition in Des Moines, Iowa we entered 3 wines and won 3 medals. We took a Gold for our “Kiss Me Kate” Strawberry wine along with a sweepstakes nomination for this wine, and a silver medal for Autumn Fire and Raspberry. We are also working this year on our first heavy oak wines. These two wines, Pinot Noir and Red Merlot will be available later in the year and will be in addition to Pinot Noir and Red Merlot that we already offer in light to medium oak. Also we will be coming out soon with our new Northern Lights dessert wine that looks as though it will be the best one we have ever made, due to the fantastic Raspberries that we purchased from the Bayfield area last season.

Plans for the Future

We are discussing the making of a cherry wine for the future as we have had many requests for it. We’re also planning the planting of other fruit crops for winemaking. We’re also working on a power point presentation and working towards the shipping of our wine as the requests for this keep coming.

Thanks for your interest,

See you soon at Brigadoon!

Accomplishments