Josie Boyle

Specializing in premium sparkling wines and Midwest winemaking.

Josie's four years of wine production experience includes a harvest at Vidal Estate, a premium New Zealand winery performing such cellar duties as red fermentation pump-overs and plunging, racking, blending, barrel work (racking, topping, cleaning), operating the crusher/destemmer and presses, and performing lab tests.

Once she returned to the States, Josie was Cellar Master at the award-winning, family-owned Michigan winery, L. Mawby Vineyards, using both V. vinifera and cold-hardy varieties to make premium sparkling wines in the méthode champenoise and charmat method. In her capacity as Cellar Master, she was exposed to a little bit of everything related to winery operations. This included performing cellar duties such as racking, filtering, bottling, and blending; forecasting inventory needs; recordkeeping; troubleshooting machinery and production issues; performing harvest operations; and helping out in the tasting room when things got hectic. Furthermore, she experienced first-hand a period of rapid growth in the winery where several areas of production were expanded and automated to increase production from ~8,000 cases to ~12,000 cases annually.

Upon moving back to her home state of Minnesota, Josie worked for a spell at Dancing Dragonfly Vineyards in St. Croix Falls, WI, where she assisted in the production of red and white wines from cold-hardy varieties including Marquette, Frontenac, Frontenac Gris, La Crescent, and Prairie Star.

Now back in Minneapolis, Josie is setting her sights on opening a sparkling winery in the city. Using locally-sourced grapes, she will make traditional Champagne-style, bottle-fermented sparkling wines as well as some limited-release, experimental batches of craft sparkling wines. Implementation of this grand plan is set to start during the Fall of 2013.

While not making wine, Josie enjoys throwing a frisbee, singing karaoke, listening to live music, paddling down a river, growing bonsai trees, and curling.