Make no mistake, sales of Missouri wines are not poised to overtake their more famous peers. According to the San Francisco-based Wine Institute, in 2005 California producers bottled and sold an estimated 532 million gallons of wine. French winemakers, still the leaders in world production, more than doubled California's output. Add to that record wine exports from relative newcomers such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina and Chile, and you have got a true embarrassment of enological riches.

Still, Mississippi River Hills winery owners such as Johnson, a former St. Louis insurance executive, remain confident they can sell enough wine to sustain themselves, especially in markets he calls "our backyard," the Mississippi River Hills region itself and St. Louis.

Johnson even utters a line that would be unthinkable in places like the wine-sodden Napa Valley: "We have four wonderful wineries in the area now: mine, Crown Valley, Cave and Charleville. It would suit me very well if there were ten more."

This isn't as crazy as it sounds. Johnson says local winemakers are currently unable to grow enough grapes to keep up with demand for their wines, and that the larger operations, such as Crown Valley, must buy non-Missouri grape juice to supplement their own fruit. Having more wineries will also help the region reach a critical mass for tourism. People want a variety of places to tour and wines to sample, Johnson says. "The wineries would all be different. The wines would be different. How much more fun would that be?" Most important, he adds, additional wineries would help the wider world recognize what attracted winemakers like him to the area in the first place: its superior terroir.

The Mississippi River Hills region is further south than many of Missouri's older wine making operations, Johnson says, with slightly warmer surface and soil temperatures. This is good for, among other things, sugar development in his grapes. Soils in the region can be rocky and poor, which, oddly enough, is also a good thing. Rocky soils drain better and are less likely to impart inappropriate tastes to the finished wine.

"Think about, say, the area around Augusta, Mo.," he says. "It's glacial till, six feet of black dirt. They are constantly fighting vegetative growth that, believe it or not, can impart a vegetative flavor. Think about it in terms of, say, the taste of bell pepper and canned asparagus. That's not something we want in the wine."

Published by the Office of Research.

©2006 Curators of the University of Missouri. Click here to contact the editor.