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This sounds simple enough.

Stick a plant in the ground, let fertile Iowa soil work its magic, mix in a little business savvy and launch another agriculture-related industry – one that draws a crowd.

In this case, the industry is grape growing and winemaking. It drew a crowd of about 400,000 people last year to the 71 wineries that have sprouted around the state in an almost overnight boom that by most accounts had its beginnings at a meeting held at the tail end of a blizzard in February 2000.

Of those wineries, 15 are located along the Heart of Iowa Wine Trail, designed to place wine tourists within an hour’s drive of Des Moines. Its first formal event was held over two weekends this past February. The most notable element of the wine trail’s debut was that snowstorms struck on each weekend, intimidating all but the hardiest wine travelers.

Still, an infant winery about 30 miles south of Des Moines entertained 10 to 15 wine travelers on each day of the four-day event, a positive sign of things to come, its owner said.

But back to that meeting in another snowstorm eight years ago at an Odd Fellows hall in Indianola. It showed signs of things to come, too.

Ron Mark called the meeting. He teamed up with a private-label winemaker from southern Iowa and an Iowa State University extension agent to talk what they thought would be a small group of farmers into planting an alternative crop.

Mark was three years into fulfilling a longtime ambition to make wine when he realized he needed more grapes. He had started out small in 1997, making wine in the garage of his home north of Indianola and planting an acre of wine grapes each year to meet his production needs. He had plans to expand and he needed more grapes.

There were few local sources for the grapes Mark wanted, varieties that could withstand the extremes of Iowa weather, resist disease and still produce good wine.

A quick scan of the parking lot outside the meeting revealed an assortment of foreign sports cars and upscale sport utility vehicles, with license plates from across the state.

“These weren’t necessarily your normal farmers,” Mark said.

Instead, the vehicles belonged to 120 people intrigued by the prospect of growing their own grapes and, possibly, competing with Mark’s wine-making dream.

They were not intimidated by the economics.

Vineyard start-up costs are between $5,000 and $7,000 an acre. Each acre of grapes requires about 100 hours of human attention, and that’s just while they’re on the vine. All of those people interested in competing with Mark could plan on spending about $250,000 to start a small 5,000-gallon winemaking operation, enough to produce about 25,000 bottles of wine.

Winemakers and grape growers hit the landscape after that meeting. A tourism industry boomed, too.

“We’re all there for the same intent: to improve agri-tourism in the state,” said Gary Edgington, co-owner of Two Saints Winery near St. Charles and a public relations coordinator for the Heart of Iowa Wine Trail.

Wine Tourism 101

In addition to ballyhooing the product, wine tourism is being promoted through special events ranging from mystery theater to wine and food pairing events, wine samplings at grocery stores, fairs and festivals, and the sale of Iowa-grown food and local arts and crafts.

In addition, many of the wineries, such as Mark’s Summerset Winery, accommodate weddings and special events.

The package appears to be working.

A survey last year of travelers stopping at Iowa Welcome Centers found that wine tourists spent an average of $250 over each of the 4.5 days they spent in the state, figures that surpass those for travelers who said they had other reasons for visiting the state.

Iowa Wine Monthly Productoin and Sales, click here to see larger

Wine tourists “seem to be staying longer and they are spending a little more,” said Nancy Landess, manager of the Iowa Tourism Office.

The sale of Iowa wines at wineries and in retail outlets has grown steadily in the state, accounting for 7 percent of all wine sales last year, according to a comparison of data compiled by an Iowa State University researcher and total wine sales reported by the Iowa Alcoholic Beverages division.

“It took states like Missouri 20 years to reach those numbers,” Mark said.

Annual wine production has increased from 54,527 gallons in December 2002 to 267,075 gallons in December 2007. The market value of the wine produced in the last year is $16 million, according to wine sales date compiled by Craig Tordsen, an Iowa State University value-added agriculture specialist,

“It’s growing and it’s interesting,” said Tordsen, who tracks the state’s wine industry for the university’s Midwest Grape and Wine Industry Institute.

His survey of Iowa wineries found that they expect to sell $22 million of wine this year.

Mark, whose Summerset Winery is considered the “big dog” in the state with about 100 acres of grapes under contract and the ability to process more than 100,000 bottles of wine, said that for the first time since entering the business he had $1 million in sales last year after about $850,000 in 2006.

Another of the state’s largest vintners, Tassel Ridge Winery near Oskaloosa, expects about $750,000 in sales this year, said owner Bob Wersen, who also is president of the Heart of Iowa Wine Trail.

Tassel Ridge, which hosts wine and food pairings along with other events, includes 49 acres of vineyards, with another seven under contract. Wersen said he needs about $1 million in annual sales to break even.

Wersen is a California native who was a wine traveler in that state’s famous Napa Valley wine region. He opened the winery after relocating a successful business to Iowa. He is not afraid of competition. He would like to see grape acres expand beyond the state’s current 875 acres, and he would welcome more wineries.

Betting on Iowa

Wersen and Mark are among the Iowa winemakers who have pressed others in their industry to establish basic standards of quality control.

Murli Dharmadhikari is the director of Iowa State’s wine institute. He is a veteran of the Missouri wine industry as well as an academic, and he suspects that Iowa might have “gotten a little ahead of itself” by placing a heavy emphasis on wine tourism – Heart of Iowa is one of five wine trails in the state – before determining the quality of the product and its presentation.

Among its several missions, the wine institute conducts sessions at wineries and tests in its laboratory that are designed to remove any hint of wine faults.

“If you have to start somewhere, you have to start with a quality wine,” Dharmadhikari said, conceding that the “the reason people like to buy wine in a winery is the experience that they are getting. What they are tasting is a story in a glass.”

Dharmadhikari would like for that story to include a label that shows that the wine has been tested and tasted for any sensory faults. If it met certain standards, the wine would carry a Vintner’s Quality Alliance seal. So far, the idea has been slow to catch on with some winemakers, but it could be key to the ability of Iowa wineries to compete with vintners from other Midwest states, not to mention California and international wines.

As the market for all wines grows, “somebody is going to satisfy that demand. The question is are they going to be Iowa growers and producers or are they going to be out of state?” he said.

Gary Edgington and Christine Carlton bottled their first vintages of wine last year from 10 acres of grapes they grow on property they bought for the sole purpose of launching a winery. Like Mark, they bottled their first wines in their garage.

This year’s harvest will be processed and sold in a 9,600-square-foot winery they built themselves, working weekends.

They invested about $600,000, including the value of their labor, in the winery and hope to produce about 40,000 bottles of wine a year.

Edgington said the Heart of Iowa promotion helped direct customers to the winery, which was in the final stages of construction at the time. Despite heavy snows, customers traversed the mile or so off of Interstate 35 to sample the wine.

“For not having any advertising out on the highway, we’ve managed to have some pretty good activity on weekends” since that time, Edgington said.

Edgington said wineries along the trail help tourists find their way through wine country.

“We can get people off the interstate and send them to other wineries in the area,” he said. “We’ve called other wineries to see whether they are open and we’ve had other wineries call us.”

Would Two Saints be open today if it weren’t for that meeting eight years ago in Indianola?

Ron Mark was an “inspiration to a lot of people. He has put a lot of effort into making the industry what it is,” Edgington said.

For Edgington, what that industry provides is an opportunity to show off his native state and dabble in a passion for making quality local wine.

“Our goal is to get people out into the country and see what Iowa is all about,” Edgington said.