Owning a home brew and wine making supply store plus operating our own winery?  Never in a million years would I have guessed that this would be how we would chose to spend our early retirement years!

Making wine was something that we not done since the early 1970s.  A series of chance events led us to the decision to start a winery which led us to deciding to also offer wine making and home brewing supplies and the rest is history.

The first couple of years in the business was devoted to getting our retail and web based winemaking and home brewing supply business of the ground.  A year was spent building a web site through a Clear Lake, Iowa web development company.  Another year was spent building a second web site (one that actually worked).  Our second web site was built by Impact Marketing based in Waterloo, Iowa and to say we were pleased would be an understatement.  Our contact was Andy Mullenix and I would recommend Andy and his company to anyone looking to build a new web site.

After getting the site up and running we turned to our winery business.  We presently have 7 wines available for sale with 2 more ready to bottle. We have the juice for number 10 and an idea for what we want to do with number 11.

Retirement?  Maybe next year!.

BlueStem Winery has just started stocking their wine racks with wine number EIGHT.  Number nine is will be fairly close behind and our tenth wine should be ready by the summer of 2010.

Our newly released eighth is Starry Night and it is a Late Harvest Riesling.  Our ninth wine (it will be called Two Moons ) is an Austrian Zweigelt.  Two Moons is filtered, the labels are designed (but not yet ordered) and we will start working on this on getting on the shelves as soon as all of our tanks of Starry Night have been bottled.

We rate our wines for sweetness on a zero to 10 scale with zero being dry and 10 used for dessert wines.

BlueStem Winery wines currently available include Once in a Blue Moon, a Canadian Riesling dessert wine (10); Red Crescent, a Washington Cabernet Franc dessert wine (10); Dark Side, a Chilean Montepulciano (0); Prairie Fire, a Washington Riesling (2); Feelin' Groovy, an Austrian Gruner Veltliner (1); Crystal Moon, a Washington Gewurztraminer dessert wine (10), Tongue Twister, a Washington Gewurztraminer (1) and  Starry Night (4).  and Two Moons (when it hits the shelves) will be a zero.