Popping Bottles To Promote IA Wine
CEDAR RAPIDS, IA (CBS 2/FOX 28)--A cold night sounds like a perfect night for some wine.
Believe it or not, some Corridor winemakers say the colder temperatures are helping our wine this year.
Iowa's sparkling wine is typically drier, although there still are some sweeter sparkling wines out there.
Four wineries got together for the first-ever Flight of the Corks, where winemakers got to see how far the cork flew in the air from some of their finest bubbly.
Iowa is a very, very competitive state, John Burns said, with Barrel Head Winery in Dubuque. It's about promoting more champagne in Iowa.
For John Burns, it's not just about his bubbly, but also making his wine popular around the world.
We have the conditions to make the right top quality bubbles, he said. That's what exactly what we want to do get us on the map.
Burns said to make Iowa wine, you need rich soil and lots of moisture, plus plenty of sunshine. It's a shorter growing season but it makes high acidity grapes.
We have really good conditions in Iowa to make really good champagne, he said.
Winemakers do have to be mindful that if you get really cold temps, like the ones we've been seeing, they can either help or harm the crop. It all depends on which kind of grape. For example, Burns lost about 50 percent of one of their champagne grapes last year. But, some winemakers say, this cold snap, this early, can make the grapes sweeter, once they're harvested.
Grapes like dry feet so you need the drainage but like any other plant they enjoy our good soils and if we have a good combination of sunlight and enough water we're gonna have a good crop, Steve Larson said. Larson is a member if the Iowa Wine Growers Association and winemaker at Train Wreck Winery in Algona.
Here in Iowa, there are more than 80 wineries or vineyards in our 99 counties.
Out of those 12-hundred and 50 acres, the state brings in about 420 million dollars from wine.
It's an industry that stretches from the Minnesota border to Missouri from the Mississippi to the Missouri River, Larson said. It's an industry that's really exploded.
And an industry that they hope will continue to grow.
There is no record but there will be tonight, Burns said.
Well, Friday night was all about bragging rights but Andrew Morse with Barrel Head Winery set a Guinness World Record at 49 feet and 11 inches. So that means his bubbly had more pressure inside to fly the cork further in the air.
Winemakers hope to make The Flight for the Corks an annual event.