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On a blustery winter day three years ago, Stan Olson received a telephone call he wasn’t expecting. It started like this: “Stan, we have a problem.”

Olson, who operates Penoach Vineyard & Winery just north of Adel, and assistant Jonathan Millner were in the middle of an experiment with sparkling wine that was going awry. Actually, it was going “off.”

Millner was calling from his apartment on the northeast side of Des Moines, where he was carrying out an in-bottle fermentation of the wine, a practice that traces its roots to the fine champagnes of France, when bottles started exploding. “I heard a kaboom, and said, “What was that?'” Olson recalled. “He said bottles were flying across the room.”

“They were flying around my apartment like bottle rockets,” Millner said.

That was the first batch. Three trial runs later, Olson and Millner arrived at a recipe that resulted in Penoach’s first good taste of sparkling wine.

Most of us call any sparkling wine champagne, but most of us don’t have to deal with international law that dictates that champagne can come only from the Champagne region of France. That law dates to 1891 and the Treaty of Madrid and was reiterated after World War I in the Treaty of Versailles. It is enforced by the European Union. In the United States, which did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles, a sparkling wine bottled after March 10, 1996, cannot have the word champagne on the label.

That’s a lot of tradition and history to tamper with, and few Iowa winemakers are willing to go to the trouble.

Olson admits that he wouldn’t have experimented with sparkling wine if it hadn’t been for Millner’s persistence.

Millner grew up in a family of winemakers who emigrated from Austria. His parents grew grapes and his father, uncles and cousins made wine.

“We have two traditions holding through the generations: speaking German and making wine,” said Millner, who has since moved back to Minnesota, where he has planted a vineyard and will open Millner Heritage Vineyard and Wines this fall near St. Cloud.

Millner arrived in Iowa in 2004 after serving with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.

“I saw my first full-scale vineyards in a combat zone,” he said. “But they weren’t used for wine; they were used for raisins.”

Iowa provided the lure of a burgeoning wine industry. He worked in vineyards, took additional classes in winemaking, and wound up assisting Olson at Penoach (pronounced pen oak).

He promoted sparkling wine as a niche product that he thought was well suited to the grape-growing conditions of the upper Midwest.

“It’s my belief that we have an untapped market here,” Millner said.

Though national consumption of sparkling wines is on the rise, the market for sparkling wine at Iowa wineries has been slow to develop.

Olson said he has sold between one-third and one-half of his original 12 cases of sparkling wine.

“I know when I started as a wine drinker, it was as a sweet wine drinker and I think that’s where most of our market is now,” Olson said. “I think there are far more wine drinkers than champagne drinkers.”

However, Olson will continue to make sparkling wine as he attempts to carve out a niche in the Iowa wine market. Olson and his wife, Joan, are no strangers to plotting a new path. Penoach Vineyard & Winery is located on the original farmstead where Joan grew up. The Olsons farmed 1,000 acres and raised up to 4,000 hogs. When a hired hand retired, they decided to develop a golf course on part of the farm. Then their attention turned to growing grapes, establishing a nursery for grape stock and opening the winery.

Like many Iowa winemakers, their successes and failures in the wine business were based on trial and error.

Millner encouraged Olson to make sparkling wine the traditional way, in which an initial fermentation of wine is poured into heavy bottles and put through a second fermentation, which creates the nose-tickling bubbles for which the wine is famous. The duo shortened one step, a time-consuming process called riddling that traces its origins to France in 1805, when the widow of a winemaker decided that the second fermentation would be aided by placing bottles upside down, initially at a 45-degree angle, in a special rack. The bottles were regularly turned, shaken, and literally slapped back into the rack at gradually more obtuse angles until they stood at 90 degrees. At that point, the bottles were opened and the fermentation residue disgorged from the bottle.

All of that process has been reduced by an experimental yeast that is contained inside a gel cap about the size of a grain of rice. The bottles are placed upright so that more of the wine’s surface area comes in contact with the yeast capsule. After several days, the bottle is turned upside down, a temporary cap is popped and the residue released.

“The encapsulated yeast is kind of a godsend,” Millner said.

About the same time that Olson and Millner were experimenting with sparkling wines at Penoach, one of the state’s youngest wineries, the winemaker at one of the state’s oldest wineries, 10-year-old Summerset Winery near Indianola, was experimenting with another method of making the wine.

“To get it right is a real art, a real science,” said David Klodd, vineyard manager and winemaker at Summerset.

Summerset hopes to bottle about 500 gallons or 2,500 bottles of its sparkling wine, which is sold at the winery and some retail outlets in Central Iowa. The wine is made in a more contemporary fashion, carbonated in large tanks before being bottled.

Klodd said Summerset is “pleased” with its sales volume, but he noted that there is little profit margin in making sparkling wines because it is time-consuming to process and bottle.

To make sparkling wine on a large scale would involve an investment of $60,000 to $100,000 in special equipment, he said. In addition, sparkling wine requires special bottles, corks, wire hoods and foils.

“My time and labor and equipment costs are just so much higher than for a regular bottle of wine,” Klodd said.

As with Olson and Millner, Klodd taught himself the process for making sparkling wine.

“I had nobody to teach me,” Klodd said. “It took me probably eight to 10 months to get it perfected to where we can reliably do the process.”

Still, Klodd said he would prefer to make sparkling wine in the traditional manner, similar to Penoach, but with the addition of hand riddling.