A wonderful Iowa winery

Nan Smith and some her crew bottling Red Fox wine at the Stone Cliff Winery.

As bed and breakfast proprietors, we don’t get a lot of vacation time. We do try to get away for a few days each year, usually during the middle of the week when Brambleberry is not open and during a time of year when garden and animal chores are a little less intensive.

Recently we did a three-day trip and headed to Dubuque, Iowa and Galena, Illinois before heading home. Since we enjoy wine, we always try to visit a winery. So we picked Stone Cliff Winery in Dubuque.

Stone Cliff is located along the Mississippi riverfront in the historic Star Brewery building. The winery grows grapes on a vineyard outside of the city and makes its wines in the Star Brewery building, which features a comfortable tasting room with a decorative bar.

We happened to luck out the evening we stopped because winemaker Nan Smith, who owns the winery with her husband Bob, was relaxing after a long day. As we sampled Stone Cliff wines, we talked about how we make homemade wine ourselves and that we write a weekly wine column for area newspapers.

Nan gave us a tour of the winery, which includes a fantastic reception area available for parties or meetings. She invited us back the next morning so we could observe the bottling of Red Fox wine, one of their estate-grown wines.

We stopped in after staying overnight at a Dubuque bed and breakfast and watched Nan and the crew bottle and label the wines. Nan even let Sherry run the labeling machine on a few bottles.

Stone Cliff is a great place and we recommend that you visit if you get a chance. Not only was it our first time observing a bottling machine, it was also the first time that we sampled wine that had been poured through an aerator, a device that helps red wine to breathe faster.

Of course we purchased a few bottles of wine to take home. Also coming home with us was a black sequined “What happens at the winery, stays at the winery” t-shirt that caught Sherry’s eye.