for growing!

Even though we're in Wisconsin doesn't mean we can't grow good wine grapes. There are quite a number of hybrid grapes that are very cold hardy and also produce a good wine. In addition to cold hardiness, many of these hybrids are resistant to various diseases that plague traditional Eurpoean vinifera vines.

The University of Minnesota has developed a few hybrids that I'm currently investigating, particularly Marquette grapes. They're very cold hardy (down to -35°F) and also very disease resistant. They create a good red wine that some have compared to shiraz, and others merlot, thought Pinot Noir is Marquette's grandfather. The acidity is a bit high but that can be corrected for in the winery either through blending, cold stabilization, or other methods. It also yields a fairly high sugar content, around 25 brix.

Another grape I'm investigating is the Sabrevois. This variety was bred by Elmer Swenson in Northern Wisconsin (he also did a lot of work along with the University of Minnesota). Sabrevois is also hardy down to -35°F very disease resistant and makes a complex red wine. Similar to Marquette it gives slightly high acids and its recommended to combine with a grape with higher sugars (Marquette perhaps?). It is also recommended to to a semi-carbonic maceration to ferment these grapes or at least pressing early to avoid an off flavor that often results from a full maceration.

Those two I have done the most investigation of, they're appealing to me because of their extreme cold hardiness, strong resistance to disease and the good wine they produce. Some other varieties I'm interested in but haven't investigated as much are: Marechal Foch, Noiret™, St. Croix, and Cabernet Severny. Cabernet Severny is an interesting one to me since it's not a hybrid with american grapes but was actually developed for growing in Russia. It's been hybred with a hardy Mongolian grape vine as well as some french varieties and of course Severny. Not sure how that all works out as there's not a lot of information about it online; not even sure if I'll be able to find anyone selling it.

Last weekend Anne and broke ground on our patio. As you may remember we got a bunch of pavers from my parents when they replaced their front walk. So we figured out how large of a patio we could make with them and determined where we wanted it and what we wanted to do. And finally we started digging.

The beginnings of our mud hole.

We're going with a basic rectangular shaped patio because we don't want to be cutting any of the paver bricks. It's just easier that way. We are adding a little bump out on one corner for the cast iron fireplace that you can see in the left of the above photo.

We made some pretty good progress until the torrential downpour ended our work. This past weekend we finished digging and I removed a couple of old concrete post anchors from the old section of our fence.

Sledge hammering is fun! Hack sawing is not.

This past weekend we began re-filling our hole with crushed limestone, which i don't have any photos of yet. At $2.50/bag it seems cheap until you realize how many bags of the crap you're actually going to need, yikes!

Our foreman keeps us on task throughout the process.