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Jasper Winery started small, opening four years ago in an elbow-room-only building that was rented from the city of Newton.

Turn a corner, and you were likely to bump an oak barrel. Take another step or two and you were belly up to the tasting bar.

It was intimate and claustrophobic.

Still, there was little question that the Groben family had bigger ideas when it planted its first grapevines in 2000 and pressed its first wines a few years later.

“It was a hobby that went astray,” said Jean Groben, the driving force behind the business that over the years has turned the heads of national wine magazines and established a reputation for innovation.

Her husband, Paul, manages the family’s vineyards when he is not practicing medicine. Their son, Mason, is the winemaker, having turned his post-secondary pursuit of a philosophy major into degrees in viticulture and winemaking at the University of California, Davis.

Jasper becomes an urban winery

In July, Jasper Winery moved into a new, 10,000-square-foot building with sleek lines and floor-to-ceiling windows at 2400 George Flagg Parkway on the South Side of Des Moines.

There is room to grow inside, with banquet facilities, a spacious tasting bar and production facilities capable of processing and filling 70,000 bottles of wine per year, or more as dictated by demand.

Outside is a park-like setting with a small vineyard.

Though some skeptics wondered whether an Iowa winery could – or should – flourish in an urban setting, the Grobens, led by Mason, saw opportunity in moving close to the enterprise and entertainment areas in downtown Des Moines.

“Basically, we’re bringing the country to the city and making it more accessible to more people,” Jean Groben said.

And while Mason Groben lobbied for the move, his parents made a point of visiting urban wineries in other parts of the country, as well as one in Cape Town, South Africa.

“We visited a lot of urban wineries before we made this commitment,” Jean Groben said.

The move to the city wasn’t the first time the Grobens’ actions ran counter to prevailing attitudes in the Iowa wine culture.

Groben ran afoul of the “we’ll do it on our own” mind-set pervasive in the industry when she signed on with a liquor distributor to deliver their wines throughout the state.

It was an experiment to get more exposure and sales, but one that Jasper Winery has since abandoned.

“We can do a better job promoting our wines if we are concentrating on it ourselves,” Jean Groben said. “We just think we can move our wines better than a distributor can.”

Jasper Winery is a vendor at the Downtown Farmers Market. It is unusual to visit a festival, fair, food or arts event in Central Iowa without seeing a Jasper Winery tent.

Now the winery can offer space for corporate events, weddings, even spontaneous parties at its South Side complex.

“You’re always welcome to walk in and buy a bottle of wine and throw your own party,” Jean Groben said.

A new winery to open in Waukee

After 20 years, Kurt Schade has taken all he could have asked for out of 13 acres of hills and creek bottom on the south edge of Waukee.

But that doesn’t mean he can’t ask for more.

Schade is a real estate developer and sales associate with Coldwell Banker/Mid-America Group Realtors, and in 1985 he bought the property, fronted by chain-link fence and choked with scrub trees, with the thought that he was tapping into some development land.

In the next decade, his thinking changed.

“I decided I wanted my kids to understand the value of agriculture,” Schade said.

By chance, he was palling around with Iowa wine guru Ron Mark, who offered this advice: “‘If you want to do something out of the ordinary, go plant a vineyard,'” Schade recalled.

It is safe to say that Mark has given the same advice to hundreds of people in Central Iowa in the 11 years since he set off on a grape-growing and winemaking adventure of his own in the hills south of Des Moines.

Schade turned six acres of the property into a vineyard, building trellises on the steep hillsides and teaching his boys how to operate a tractor and finer points of pruning the vines and warding off the molds and diseases that grow on neglected plants.

This year, the vineyard produced a record harvest of 14 tons of nine varieties of grapes he grows and, so far, sells to other wineries to make red and white wines.

Beginning next year, Schade should be able to process his own grapes in a winery he is building largely with his own labor.

He originally designed a million-dollar mega-winery.

But after talking to Mark, the Groben family and Iowa State University viticulture specialist Mike White, he changed his plans.

“They said if I wanted to quit my job and devote all of my time and all of my money to one thing, then I should go ahead and build it,” Schade said.

He wasn’t ready for the commitment.

Schade and his fiancee, Jana Finnegan, want to build a home near where the partially completed winery stands.

“We kind of have a vision of what we want,” Finnegan said. That vision doesn’t include hosting wine visitors and winery events seven days a week.

“We want to come out here at night and watch the sun go down,” Schade said.

They also want to combine Schade’s interest in winemaking with Finnegan’s training at the Des Moines Area Community College’s Iowa Culinary Institute.

Their plans once the winery is completed, with one wall featuring native Iowa woods and pocket doors salvaged from a 19th-century Iowa funeral home, is to host dinner parties in the winery and on a hilltop overlooking the grounds, which back up to residential Waukee.

“This has given us time to make our plans,” Schade said. “And besides, if I never make a dime out of the vineyard, it will have served its purpose.”