Life at Iron Hub Winery

As a family-owned and operated winery, everybody here wears many different hats. Spring is our bottling season, an exciting process that requires months of preparation in the cellar and lab! Our bottling team has worked hard to fill, label, and package our 2021 whites and our 2020 reds. The bottling line produces 40 bottles a minute! Our winemaker Tom assembled the bottling line from scratch– buying individual components and utilizing his engineering skills to create a functioning bottling line. It took Tom nearly 2 months to put our bottling line together and once assembled it meant Iron Hub could bottle here! Iron Hub is one of the only wineries to own a bottling line. Having our own bottling line allows Tom and Spencer to bottle once the wine is perfected.

In the vineyard, our vines have woken and new shoots are beginning to reach for the trellis wires. Our vines had a setback from an unfortunate frost event in mid-April, which severely damaged the young primary shoots. Fortunately, vines are resilient and sprouted secondary shoots. These secondary shoots will establish a dense canopy, with significantly lower yields compared to the primary shoots. Spencer is working diligently in the vineyard to mitigate the frost damaging effects and ensure the secondary shoots have ideal fruit-bearing conditions. Spencer explains, “the frost event was frustrating, but I am still optimistic for the ‘22 vintage. As a farmer, you must adapt to each growing year, and this year will require extensive canopy management.” Fortunately, the month of April brought nearly 6 inches of rainfall to our estate, which was a relief for our old-growth, dry-farmed blocks. We will keep our fingers crossed for ideal growing conditions for the remainder of the 2022 vintage!