Eagles Landing Winery raises a glass to 20 years

By Audrey Posten, Times-Register

Eagles Landing Winery owners Jay and Cindy Halvorson like to sit back and reminisce sometimes. “Your mom would say, ‘Remember when we sold our first bottle of wine? Do you remember when this happened, or this happened?’” reflected Cindy. “All these milestones. It’s been pretty cool.”

This weekend, the Marquette-based winery will celebrate its 20th anniversary, marking another milestone the couple said was accomplished through a sweet combination of hard work, good wine and staff members who are more like family.

The venture started as a retirement project for Jay’s late father, Roger, who’d been making wine as a hobby for 40 years. He’d make a few hundred gallons each year, selling it at the bed and breakfast he and wife Connie owned in Marquette.

“In 1999, he started planting the vineyard in Fayette,” Jay said, “and was finally licensed in June of 2000 to be a winery.”

At the time, Eagles Landing was just Iowa’s 13th winery.

Jay, who’d been living in Texas but sought a change of scenery, joined the business in 2003. A year later, he took over making all the wines.

One of the first was cranberry, a sweet wine and the original best seller.

“I remember mom and dad went to Portugal for a month. We had just made our first cranberry wine, and we weren’t used to selling a whole lot of wine then,” Jay shared. “I remember selling that entire batch in the month they were gone and just being so excited.”

Another early creation, which is still bottled today, is “Sweet Ruby,” named for Jay’s grandmother.

“My grandma and grandpa, they didn’t drink much, but they always had this dusty bottle of Mogen David sitting on top of the refrigerator, probably half empty and had been all year,” said Jay. “So we decided to make a concord grape wine and it had to be named for Sweet Ruby.”

Jay said those first few years spent developing new formulas were some of the most fun.

“It would be mom and dad and Cindy and I, and we’d be making like a raspberry wine. We would just start sweetening it and taste it, then discuss it and see if it needed to be tweaked again,” he explained. “It was all hands-on, trying to balance the sweetness with the acidity and bring out the flavor in whatever the product was, whether it was a berry or grape.”

Today, Eagles Landing Winery produces 38 different labels, ranging from dry to sweet. Some are made seasonally, in small batches, every year.

“Our smallest batch is typically about 200 gallons,” Jay said. 

Other wines are made throughout the year. Something is always fermenting each month. 

“Right now,” quipped Jay, “we have about 2,000 gallons fermenting.”

He painstakingly lays out the schedule, month by month, on a whiteboard in the winery office. It breaks down which wines will be fermented each month and those that will be bottled, as well as the juices and grapes that will need to be purchased to supplement what the winery vineyards already produce.

“There’s a lot of planning, and a lot of it is a year in advance,” Jay said. “But we’ve been doing it long enough that we kind of have a feel for—depending on the time of year­—what’s going to sell. Figuring out how much to make to meet that demand is the challenge.”

Of all Eagles Landing wines, the sweet, berry-flavored Campfire Hootch is by far the best seller. It was first made in 2008—as a complete accident. 

“Every time I fermented a berry wine, my secondary storage tank was just a little bit smaller than the fermentation tank, so I was always pouring down the drain three, five, seven gallons of perfectly good wine because I had no place to put it,” Jay shared. 

Eventually, he started saving it, filling first a 100-liter tank, then 200- and 500-liter tanks. By the time he filled a 1,000-liter tank, which is about 264 gallons, he sweetened it.

The next step was determining a name.

“We were sitting in the tasting room one day, trying to figure it out, and this guy from Wyoming came in—a cowboy with a big belt buckle and boots and hat—and said, ‘I need me some hootch for my campfire,’” Jay recalled. “That’s where the name came from.”

“We were kind of hesitant,” admitted Cindy, “because we didn’t know if his mom and dad would like the name.”

“But dad got used to it once he saw how much it sold,” Jay said, smiling.

When the new wine was released, Cindy said Eagles Landing sold 90 cases in just 2.5 weeks.

“Then you had to figure out how to make it again,” Jay added. “I just developed a recipe, and it hasn’t changed much since 2008.”

Other things have changed, though. In addition to a growing selection of wines—many of which, like Sweet Ruby, are named for family members—the winery has a growing distribution network. Eagles Landing wines are now available at over 150 locations in Iowa and Wisconsin.

“Every week, we’ll bottle either a 1,000-liter or a 2,000-liter tank,” Jay said. “That’s 1,100 to 2,200 bottles depending on which tank you bottle out of.”

The winery is also a popular place to be. The tasting room has expanded over the years and can now hold as many as 40 people on a busy fall day, noted Cindy. The “Wine Down Room,” next door to the tasting room, was recently remodeled, offering seating for groups to relax and enjoy a glass of a wine. The outdoor wine garden hosts live music nearly every weekend in the warmer months.

“It’s just a nice thing for people to do to get away,” said Cindy. 

She and Jay especially enjoy seeing customers who came back year after year, often traveling from hours away to stock up on their favorite wines. “They all have a special place in our heart,” she added. “It’s just really taken off.”

It’s not only customers who appreciate Eagles Landing. Their wines have won countless awards, Jay was named Iowa’s Wine Maker of the Year in 2014, and, in 2018, Eagles Landing was recognized as Winery of the Year in the Midwest by Grapevine Magazine.

“We’ve been very blessed with all the awards and all the people you meet in 20 years,” said Jay.

In a way, he noted, their success mirrors that of the Iowa wine industry as a whole.

“Now, there are 110 wineries in Iowa, and the industry has improved leaps and bounds,” he stated. “There are some really good wines being made in Iowa and, regionally, Iowa wines are starting to be noticed and gain some acclaim. There’s nothing but good going forward.”

Cindy and Jay are proud of Eagles Landing’s role as one of the forerunners. They credit Roger and Connie with letting them try new ideas and take chances, and hope it leads to sustained success.

“I can’t help but wonder what dad would say. I don’t know if he thought it would last 20 years,” Jay remarked. “Hopefully we’ve built something that can last and live to 40 years or 100 years.”

Eagles Landing Winery, located at 127 North St., in downtown Marquette, will hold a 20th anniversary celebration this Saturday, June 20. The Bruce Bearinger Band, which is also celebrating its 20th year, will play from 1 to 4 p.m. Door prizes will be given away to the first 200 customers.