“They took quite a liking to it. You need to watch the grapes all the time,” says Petersen, who’s banking on humans cultivating a similar yen for the fruit he has planted to boost his farming income. With today’s agriculture prices among their lowest in years, every square foot that can bear crops is a lifeline. Yet corn and soybeans don’t demand the dollar they once did, and farmers from throughout the Midwest are increasingly turning to the bottle to survive.
No, not in that sense. It’s the wine inside that’s proving a profitable brew. A few acres of grapes can net $12,000 to $16,000 compared to $300 to $400 from a corn plot of equal size. Vines require a lot more care than stalks, though, and no-one’s talking about eschewing Iowa’s signature crop entirely. Still, Iowa’s total annual wine production seems set to eclipse 40,000 gallons this year. Even if that’s a mere drop compared to California’s output of 520 million and New York’s 25 million, the American Vintner’s Association is taking notice. “Iowa was sort of a non-entity,” says AVA president Bill Nelson. “Now it’s just the latest in this crop of latecomers.”
Grape growing began taking root ten years ago. After the 1980s included some of the worst years on record for Midwest farmers, words like “alternative agriculture” became the buzz of 4-H meetings. Fruit wines were already a growth industry, but grapes were on David Lundstrum’s agenda when he took over a friend’s failing apple orchard in 1993. “I had more than one banker say to me ‘if you want to open a vineyard, go to California,’ " says Lundstrum. He received more encouraging words from the Indiana Wine Grape Council, a group of Purdue University academics that formed in 1989 to advise fledgling vintners. Lundstrum opened Anderson’s Orchard and Winery near Valparaiso in 1994, and now produces close to 10,000 gallons a year. “Owning a winery is not sitting around with a glass of Cabernet in your hand watching the grapes grow,” says Lundstrum. “There’s a lot you have to do to create the total wine experience.”
That’s helping draw Napa-minded tourists to Midwest wineries. The dollars pumped into local coffers during the prime harvesting and bottling months of August and September help many families survive the winter. The Tabor family has endured its share of inclement weather in five generations of corn farming outside Dubuque, Iowa. Paul Tabor, a onetime microbiology professor at Indiana State University, became a vintner, quite unwittingly, in 1987 when he was asked to care for a vineyard by its ailing owner and received the harvest as payment. Tabor took the cuttings from Terre Haute back to Iowa, to gauge their progress in local soil. The scientist in him quickly saw that the Marechal Foch variety of red grape–also popular on the East Coast–was most adept at surviving below-zero temperatures. That fruit has since become the basis for many of the 14 labels sold at the Tabor Family Winery, which opened in 1997. Varieties range from Barn Dance Red, a favorite table wine, to Moonlight White, a drier quaff that was served to 700 guests at the inaugural ball for Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack last year.
Profits aren’t just keeping the Tabor family in business. They have nearly five acres of their own grapes, but reap from others grown nearby. “You either figure out how to be big, or figure out something else to do,” says Petersen, who went to Paul Tabor’s free Grape Growing 101 session last year, and walked out with a complimentary armful of Marechal Foch cuttings. Once they’re ripe, Tabor buys them back and then turns them into wine. “As a strategy of the winery, we think it’s a good investment to help these guys out,” Tabor says. With nearly 50 farmers signed on so far, eastern Iowa could soon earn a coveted “Viticulture Area” designation from the feds. The official seal, which graces products like those from the Napa Valley, indicates that a wine hails from a premium grape-growing region.
The wine business isn’t altogether new to Iowa. The state was ranked sixth in grape production before Prohibition, but the vines went dry when farmers shifted focus to corn and soybeans in the 1930s. Later herbicide damage all but erased what was left of the vineyards. Now, learning from their past should help their future.
Word of mouth doesn’t hurt either. After its 1997 Chardonel was on the wine list at California’s Pebble Beach Resort, the Blumenhof Vineyards became the talk of central Missouri. Didn’t matter that the vintage wasn’t a huge hit out West. “That’s the up and coming wine in our area,” says Jody Zahm, who often sells it by the case. “People are begging for it here.” With raves like that, there may be more electric-fenced vineyards in Iowa’s future.
