Christmas shopping!

Is there anyone on your Christmas list who likes wine?  We kind of thought so!

On Sundays during the Christmas season, join our winery's professional gift-basket creator and create your own one-of-a-kind gift baskets!  We'll provide the upscale basket and the packaging material, as well as give you a glass of wine and appetizers to snack on while you create!  We'll also give you a 5% discount on all of the retail items you purchase for your basket!

We'll have a large selection of wines, gift items and unique wine accessories to fill your gift baskets with.  So, just gather your items and start assembling.  We'll help you with the rest!

We're excited to spend a day Christmas shopping with you!

$20.  
December 1st. Register here.
December 8th. Register here.
December 15th. Register here. 

that!

Four Daughters Halloween Gourmet. Squash Confit and Brown Butter Pecan Sauce recipe included!

Black and Orange Pasta

Squash Confit with a Brown Butter Pecan Sauce

Black (or regular) Pasta Noodles, 1LB par cooked
Confit Butternut Squash (recipe below)

Bacon Bits, 1CUP
Grated Parmesan, 1TBSP

Brown Butter Pecan Sauce:

Butter, 1/2 LB
Brown Sugar, 1 TBSP
Fresh Sage, 1 TSP chopped
Pecan Pesto, 2 TBSP (see recipe below)

Serves 4

To make Pasta
1 Heat a thick-bottomed skillet on medium heat. Add the sliced butter (sliced so that the butter melts more evenly) whisking frequently. Continue to cook the butter.
2 Once melted the butter will foam up a bit, then subside. Watch carefully as lightly browned specks begin to form at the bottom of the pan. Smell the butter; it should have a nutty aroma. Remove from heat and whisk in the brown sugar, pesto and fresh sage.
3. Warm the pasta in hot water and add hot noodle to the sauce.  Also add the bacon and squash confit.  Toss all of the ingredients.  Place in bowls and garnish with fresh parmesan

Squash Confit
Butternut Squash, peeled, seeded and cut into large dice-1EA
Whole Garlic Cloves, 1/2Cup
Fresh Thyme Sprigs, 3 to 4 each
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil

To confit, place all ingredients into a baking dish and cover with olive oil.  Cover with foil and bake at 300 until the squash is soft but not falling apart.  Remove squash from oil.  (Tip: after you remove the squash from the oil, strain the oil and save in a jar in the fridge.  You will have a nicely flavored oil that can be used for sautéing, vinaigrettes or anything else you would use olive oil for.)

Pecan Pesto
Toasted Pecans, 1Cup
Shredded Parmesan Cheese, 1/4Cup
Minced Garlic, 2tsp
Fresh Parsley, 1/4Cup
Salt and pepper, pinch of each
Olive Oil, 1/4Cup

In food processor combine all ingredients except the olive oil and pulse to combine.  With the machine running slowly, add the olive oil to incorporate. Taste and adjust seasonings, if needed and store in fridge.

KARE 11 Visit

We visited KARE 11 again today to do a cooking segment, which means we've got another recipe to share from our kitchen!  With our Spooky Gourmet Dinner coming up quickly, our chefs definitely have their creatives juices flowing.  Check out some of the fun things that Chef Erik brought to the studio today.

Beef Tartare--yep, that looks like a brain. :)

Syringe-dressed Escargot

Bloody Mary Salad, with a side of 'poison' dressing

Four Daughters Marquette Caramel Apples with Four Daughters Marquette salt

And now to see it all in live action!

Ask Us Anything!

We get all sorts of questions from the many visitors who come through our doors!

We thought we'd give you all the chance to ask all of us (the owners, the winemaker, the managers, the vineyard team, the chefs, the daughters...) some of the questions you might have!  

Just post a question in the comments below and we'll start answering them the best we can.  Excited to hear what you're all thinking!  

GSM 744 is on its way!

We have a brand new wine hitting the shelves in about a month!  GSM 744 is a blend of Grenache, Syrah and Mouvedre.  For those of you unfamiliar with some of these wines, here's a quick tutorial:

Grenache (pronounced gren-aash): is one of the most widely planted red wine grape varieties in the world.  It is generally spicy, berry-flavored and soft on the palate with a relatively high alcohol content.

Syrah: Not to be confused with Petite Sirah, this is touted as Australia's spicy, big-hitting red wine.  Why the confusion between Shiraz and Syrah?  It's the same grape!  In France it is known and grown as Syrah, and responsible for some of the Northern Rhone's big, bold red wines.  However, in Australia and South Africa it goes by Shiraz.

Mouvedre: This variety can be a difficult grape to grow, preferring "its face in the hot sun and its feet in the water."  The vines produce intensely flavored fruit  that is not overly jammy or herbaceous.  The wines often has wild game and/or earthy notes to them, with soft red fruit flavors.

Now that you know about the varieties, here's a bit of info about our wine!

• The grapes all came in fresh from California.
• Our winemaker barrel-aged the separate varieties for nearly a year.
• The finished blend is described as fruity and oaky.  

GSM is pretty obvious, but what does the 744 stand for?  Good question!
There were 7 barrels of Grenache, blended with 4 barrels of Syrah and 4 barrels of Mouvedre. Naming magic!

September Recap!

Wow--September has been an exceptionally busy month for us.  From making wine to stomping grapes to serving a record number of tastings, we're all pretty excited about how the month went!  It seems as if everyone loves wine as much as us!

Lobster Boil

This was a sold out event and everyone that came had a great time, including us!  It was an awesome kick off to our 2nd annual Grape Stomp Festival.  Each guest had a full lobster and following that, the chefs dumped out pots of crayfish, sausage, corn, clams, shrimp and potatoes.  A true New England experience!

Grape Stomp

The next few days were a crazy blur of grape stomping!  It started with our celebrity grape stomp on Friday night and continued into team stomping on Saturday.  There were some awesome costumes!

The grapes are ready to be smashed!

Post Bulletin editor Jay Furst stomped with his wife!

Betsy Singer took on Team Post Bulletin.

Tom Overlie, dressed as a newsman, was a stomping machine.

Jennifer Koski, from Rochester Magazine, stomped with us for a second time.  Read about her experience here.  She also took all of these photos!

Betsy Singer (KAAL) and Tom Overlie (KTTC), former co-anchors, went head to head!

Defending champs, Dunken & Samm, from the KROC morning show, were the team to beat.

In the end, it was almost too close to call.

So we brought in the big guns--Betsy.  Tom Overlie was the winner!  He donated the Four Daughters' annual grape stomp charity check to Paws & Claws this year!

On Saturday, we welcomed our team grape stompers.  Check out the video below to see how that went!

KTTC Rochester, Austin, Mason City News, Weather and Sports

And now, we wait patiently as the 2013 vintage ferments and turns into wine!  Big month around here!

Setting up for tonight!!

Largest lobster eating group you've ever seen?

How to press grapes and start making wine, explained in 30 seconds or less.

You dump multiple bins (called picking lugs) into the top of the crusher/destemmer.  Voila!  The process has begun.

The crusher/destemmer has that name for a reason.  Notice how cleanly the stems shoot out?  Don't you wish you had known about this machine when you were feeding your hungry 3 year old grapes all afternoon???

The crusher part of the equipment cuts open each grape, preparing it to be pressed momentarily.  

We employ many pumps.  This powerful pump moves the crushed grapes from the crusher/destemmer over to the press.

And right into the press.  Isn't that nifty??

The crushed grapes wait patiently in the press until their cycle begins.

 Even before the pressing begins, the juice starts flowing out.  Music to our ears!

 Our gigantic press is ready to begin!  This is a new addition to our harvest equipment this year.

Now, let's put all those steps together in live action. 

Who's ready to help with harvest now?  Let the wine making begin!

Is the production room starting to look different?

For those of you that ever been inside our production area, you can tell that it's starting to look a little different around here!

Here are a few pictures of what it looked like when we first moved in:

Little did we know, the tanks were not nearly large enough to store the amount of wine we would need to make one year down the road.  So, for the 2012 vintage, we bought some even bigger tanks!  Surely, this would be large enough, right?

Notice the big new tanks in the back?

Well, we're now preparing for some pretty exciting changes in the production room.  Our tanks are quickly being shuffled around as we prepare.  More info soon!

Meet the Winemaker!

Justin Osborne is the winemaker at Four Daughters Vineyard and Winery. Before entering the world of wine, he was also in the ‘relaxation’ industry, working at his family’s ice-fishing company, Clam Corporation.  He could have stayed there, but of all things, he listened to his mother-in-law. This isn’t where the story goes downhill, though. “Vicky wanted to start a winery and we were almost immediately all-in,” Justin says.

The idea was a little bit out there, but interesting to say the least and if it turned into any sort of success, winemaker would be heck of a career, and cool job title to boot!

“It just seemed like a fun adventure to try something new,” Justin says.

He went through the University of Missouri’s VESTA program for winemaking several years ago and studied enology, the making of wine.

Four Daughters is one of about 40 licensed wineries in Minnesota. Most of the state’s wineries are rather small – producing fewer than 1,000 cases of wine each year, says Katie Cook, researcher at U of M with a master’s degree in enology and experience with grapes from all over the world. She, like Justin, is fond of the idea of grape growing and winemaking in Minnesota. Of course, most people think of the Mediterranean, California or Argentina when they picture vineyards and wineries. However, Minnesota’s cold hardy grapes, its winemakers, grape growers’ association and research efforts deserve a tip of the hat, too. There is an identity uphold.

“It’s kind of forging our own identity,” Cook said. “’It’s kind of the idea of bringing something unique to this area.”

And Minnesota’s wine production is about to get a boost. Justin and Four Daughters will soon crank up production to 10,000 cases per year after installing four additional 4,000-gallon tanks this fall. That will be enough for Four Daughters to start wholesaling its wine to local suppliers. Come production time, that will mean intense aromas from many gallons of wine – euphoria!

As winemaker, Justin is a chemist. The process starts at grape crushing and proceeds through adding yeast, fermenting, pressing skins and eventually bottling. Through it all, he most enjoys pressing: squeezing the fermented skins of red grapes and smelling the overpowering rush of hundreds of gallons of wine rushing out at once.

“You know it’s going to be good,” Justin says. “It smells really good, and it’s really strong.”

Winemaking may seemingly come with a lot of pride, secrecy and experimentation, but that’s not necessarily the case. To a degree, Cook says, it’s an art form. Mostly, it’s science.

“For me, it’s about science, or even less than that,” Justin says. “It’s about basic rules.” Experimentation only goes so far. Playing around with a centuries-old craft likely isn’t going to improve much and the Four Daughters winemaker realizes that.

As a winemaker, working hours vary greatly. It’s sort of like farming; sometimes he just has to sit and wait. Other times, he’s up until 4 a.m. during the grape crush, scrambling to turn seemingly endless buckets of grapes into mash, and then into juice. Then he waits for the particles to settle out of the juice.

“One of the biggest, time-consuming parts is the settling of wine. I can’t make it settle any faster.”

Once the elements have settled and the juice is moved into storage tanks for fermentation, he waits again. He monitors; then he waits some more. Thus far, he’s been very happy with his bottled results. At the beginning, he hoped for mere mediocrity, second-guessed himself and even considered hiring a winemaker to help! He didn’t and it’s become apparent that he has a natural knack for winemaking.  He’s received several awards for various wines, including the biggest awards of last year’s International Cold Climate Competition, the coveted Governor’s Cup and the “Best of Show” award for the top white wine. To Justin, that’s exciting, but only for a short time. Winemakers can’t rest on their laurels!

Whenever we reach a big milestone, we like to do a little reflecting...  Hitting 5,000 followers over on Facebook definitely has us doing this.  We were reminded of when we had our first 50 followers and were ecstatic because there were a few people who weren't even related to us!  

And now we want to celebrate all of you!  You have 3 chances to win a bottle of our Frontenac Gris over on Facebook!  Share, like or comment on the video for 3 chances to win.  We’ll select a winner next week.  Thank you everyone!   Enjoy the video and the memories!

Our visit to Frog's Leap Winery in Rutherford, CA, outside Napa.

We can't say enough good things about Frog's Leap.  We visited yesterday afternoon and our hosts, Frank Leeds, his daughter Lauren and her husband Joe Pesch, were so kind.  They came to meet with us on a Sunday and answered any question we had, as well as talked about where they see the Minnesota wine industry headed.  Such nice people!  

This winery was easily one of the most beautiful we've visited in the Napa Valley!  Tastings are by reservation only, so plan ahead if you're visiting.  

We were connected to this group through one of our Facebook friends (thanks Jennie Eukel!) and as Jennie and I talked about the visit more, I learned that Joe is originally from Minnesota and he and Lauren planted an acre of cold-hardy grapes with Joe's dad in Plainview, MN.  Coincidentally, Joe's dad Dan (a Family Doctor in Plainview for many years) actually sold grapes to us for the past two years!  Sadly, he passed away last September.  He provided wonderful grapes, but he was also a wonderful person.  I could see many similarities when we met Joe.  

The more you travel, the more you see how small the world really is...

We're looking forward to hosting Frank, Joe and Lauren when they visit Minnesota next!

Napa

We're in napa today!  The wineries are absolutely gorgeous and we're meeting some wonderful people.  Pictures and stories tonight!  On to gloria ferrer in sonoma. 

Frog's Leap is gorgeous!

Spending the day in Napa today.  Frog's Leap winery had amazing wine.  We drank a 2005 Merlot that they should be very proud of!  More on this great winery tonight.

Yep, we're drinking wine at 9am...

Old Vine

The tree that you see is actually a 90 year old vine planted by this winemakers grandfather.  So cool!  One of the oldest vines in the country.