Looking ahead a couple of months, around the middle of April, we plan to start pruning. If you would like to learn the basics of pruning, let us know and come on over for some hands on experience.
     

In the last blog post we told you we would be harvesting the new 2-1-17 grape from Tom Plocher.  The harvest went great on these 17 vines in the experimental plot.  Rod Ballinger made wine from this grape varietal, which is currently aging in an oak barrel down in the cellar at Bear Creek Winery.  I had a taste last week and WOW it is good already! Rod has bottled a few bottles for us to take to Napa and Oregon and let some of the winemakers have a taste of North Dakota.

Barrel tasting is common out in wine country where for a fee you can taste the young wine out of the barrel and then book it.  When the wine is ready in a couple of years, it will be bottled and then shipped to you.    Generally the wine is sold out before it's bottled.

The methods and wine making ability of Rod and others in North Dakota show me that the potential for these new Cold Hardy Hybrids have no limits in creating fine wine in the future.

-R