This is the latest installment in Midwest Microbrew’s ongoing brewmaster and winemaker interview series, spotlighting the people behind the Heartland’s craft beverage scene.
There’s a particular kind of Iowa logic that runs through the story of Fireside Winery, and it starts with a Corvette. When Zach Bott’s father-in-law first imagined building a winery, the plan was to construct something beautiful out on a gravel road, tucked into the family’s farmland near Marengo. But the man footing the bill also happened to own a Corvette, and gravel roads and sports cars don’t mix. “He’s like, I wouldn’t drive out there,” Bott recalls. So the plan shifted, a plain Morton building near one of the family’s farms became the new site, and twenty years later that unassuming metal structure is the heart of one of Eastern Iowa’s most distinctive wineries.
It’s a fitting origin story for a business built on adaptability. Fireside Winery didn’t emerge from a lifelong dream of winemaking, but from a family looking to diversify, a bit of trial and error, and a willingness to keep changing course. Two decades in, that same restless, experimental spirit still defines how Zach Bott runs the winemaking side of the operation.
An Unlikely Winemaker
Zach Bott’s résumé doesn’t read like a typical winemaker’s. He holds a bachelor’s degree in animal science from Iowa State University and spent about ten years working as a grain trader before he ever pressed a grape professionally. Winemaking, as he tells it, started as little more than a hobby project that got out of hand in the best possible way. His family farmed roughly 4,000 acres of row crops in the area, and when they started looking for ways to diversify their portfolio, someone floated the idea of planting a few acres of grapes.
“I didn’t have a lot of experience, but I like to do some hobby stuff, and we decided this would be a fun way,” Bott says of those early days. The family put in a small vineyard, made a couple thousand gallons of wine, and things simply grew from there. What began as a side project eventually became the main event. Today, the Botts have stepped away entirely from row-crop farming, and the family that once managed thousands of acres of corn and soybeans now tends about twenty-some acres of grapes and runs Fireside Winery full time. (It’s a trajectory not unlike the one behind Toppling Goliath’s rise from a Decorah cornfield to a nationally distributed brewery — another reminder that some of Iowa’s best craft beverage stories start on a farm.)
That transition mirrors a broader shift in how the winery sources its fruit. In the early years, Fireside bought the bulk of its grapes from out of state, leaning on established growing regions to supply what Iowa’s unpredictable climate couldn’t always guarantee. Over time, that changed. “We’ve sort of changed that to where we’re pretty much buying grapes from, or raising all of our own grapes from, Iowa fruit now,” Bott explains. It’s a subtle but significant evolution: a winery that started by importing its raw materials has grown into one defined by what it can coax out of Iowa soil. Growing wine grapes in a state better known for corn is no small feat, and Bott is candid about the challenge, comparing it to the struggles craft brewers face trying to grow hops in the same unpredictable climate. Twenty years in, he still describes it as a project the family will “probably never figure out” completely, a comment that reads less like resignation and more like genuine, ongoing curiosity.
Two Doors, Two Very Different Welcomes
Fireside Winery isn’t a single destination; it’s two, and they don’t look or feel anything alike. The flagship location sits on rural ground near Marengo, in that same Morton building that replaced the gravel-road dream. From the outside, Bott admits, “you probably think you’re just going into a farm building.” The transformation happens out back, where a landscaped backyard opens up into gazebos, fire pits, rows of grapevines, and open space designed for lingering. It’s the kind of setting where visitors come for a glass of wine and end up staying for the sunset.
The second location, about twenty miles away in Amana, offers a completely different atmosphere. Roughly a decade ago, Fireside purchased the Ackerman Winery brand, which had built its reputation primarily on fruit wines, bringing Fireside into the heart of the Amana Colonies, a historic German communal settlement known for its old-world charm. The Amana store reflects that heritage: a larger retail space packed with products to sample and browse, staffed by people eager to walk visitors through the options.
What ties the two locations together is programming that turns a simple tasting into an occasion. Marengo hosts live music roughly every other weekend, with a mix of classic pop hits from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s alongside solo singer-songwriters, plus a Sunday afternoon tradition of music out among the vines. Once a year, the winery even brings in a dueling pianos act for a night of Billy Joel and Elton John covers. It’s a reminder that Fireside isn’t just selling bottles; it’s selling an afternoon or evening spent outside, glass in hand, with something good playing in the background.
What’s in the Glass
Ask Bott to describe Fireside’s tasting experience, and the word that comes up again and again is variety. For ten dollars, visitors can work through a flight of five two-ounce pours pulled from a lineup of roughly fifty different products, ranging from the sweetest fruit wines imaginable to bone-dry reds, alongside ciders and sparkling options. Guests can build a custom flight or choose from pre-set options like cider flights, sparkling flights, red flights, or white flights. “Even if you don’t like wine, most of the time I can find something that you’re going to like,” Bott says, and that confidence comes through in how the core lineup is built.
The best-sellers tell the story of a winery balancing crowd-pleasing sweetness with genuine winemaking ambition. Blue, named for its blue bottle, is an off-dry white blend made from grapes grown in Fireside’s own vineyard, fruity and easy-drinking. Glow, a Brianna grape wine bottled in pink, is the winery’s most popular offering, a sweet, Moscato-style white that Bott jokes you might spot in a grocery store aisle. On the red side, the Marquette Reserve stands out as the flagship, made from Marquette grapes the winery grows itself and aged in carefully selected barrels. For sparkling wine drinkers, there’s a sparkling almond wine that, despite its playful cookie-like flavor profile, is a proper sparkling white.
Then there are the wines that exist because someone, at some point, said “why not?” Every spring, Fireside presses fresh rhubarb into wine, timing the harvest to the plant’s brief seasonal window. And in a nod to old German tradition, the winery makes dandelion wine, a project so labor-intensive and unusual that it deserves its own telling.
The Dandelion Economy
If there’s one product that captures Fireside’s willingness to do things differently, it’s the dandelion wine, and the story behind it is as charming as the wine itself. Every spring, the winery sets up shop at the Amana RV park and pays local kids eight dollars a gallon for dandelion heads, no stems, just the yellow blooms. The result is three to four hundred gallons of dandelion heads collected almost entirely by neighborhood children looking to make a little pocket money. “It’s a tremendous thing,” Bott says, and it’s easy to hear the genuine affection in how he describes it.
The winemaking process itself borrows more from tea-making than traditional viticulture. The dandelion heads are steeped for three or four days before being removed, a method Bott compares directly to brewing a strong pot of tea. The flavor, he says, is best understood through a simple exercise: pick a fresh dandelion, rub it between your fingers, and smell what’s left behind. That scent is dandelion wine. It’s a divisive product, Bott admits freely. “Some people really love it and a lot of people really don’t, but if you like it, they really love it. But everybody should try it once.” When asked what a first-time visitor absolutely needs to taste, dandelion wine is the very first thing out of his mouth.
Chasing Collaboration and Innovation
Fireside’s product lineup isn’t static, and Bott clearly relishes the chance to experiment outside the winery’s established bestsellers. The most recent example is a collaboration with Kalona Creek Lavender Farm, a partnership that produced a blackberry lavender mead released about a month before this conversation and already selling briskly. Bott draws a direct comparison to dry-hopping in beer, describing the process as essentially “lavendering” the wine, an approach borrowed from the craft brewing world’s playbook of infusing finished products with aromatic ingredients late in the process.
More experiments are already in the pipeline. The winery has started aging red and white wines in whiskey barrels, with a port-style white finished in whiskey oak slated for release that fall. These small-batch, short-run projects serve a purpose beyond novelty. They keep the tasting room lineup fresh and give returning customers a reason to stop back in, while also giving Bott room to test ideas without betting the farm, literally, on any single outcome. “There’s always a fun little thing to try here that is a short-term thing,” he notes, framing the constant tinkering as part of what makes running the winery enjoyable rather than repetitive.
That experimental streak extends to how Fireside is responding to a broader shift in drinking habits. Like much of the alcohol industry, the winery has noticed customers drinking less overall and gravitating toward lower-alcohol options even when they do choose to drink. In response, Fireside installed a canning line for ciders and introduced a run of lighter, six-to-seven-percent sparkling wines, including a dry white, a sangria-style wine, and a newly released lavender-flavored white. Bott sees the lack of rigid rules governing Iowa winemaking as a genuine advantage here. “We don’t have to do what California does,” he says, framing the freedom to experiment as one of the job’s underappreciated perks.
Pushing Back on the Midwest Wine Stereotype
Ask Bott about misconceptions, and he pivots quickly to a frustration shared by winemakers across the Midwest: the assumption that wine made from hybrid grapes, rather than classic varietals like Chardonnay or Cabernet, is inherently lesser or exclusively sweet. Fireside does sell plenty of sweet wine, and Bott says so without apology. But he’s equally proud of the winery’s dry offerings, particularly its dry whites and sparkling wines, which he considers some of the strongest products on the shelf. It’s an invitation as much as a correction: try the dry stuff, even if you’ve already decided Midwest wine isn’t for you.
That confidence extends to how Bott talks about the regional wine scene as a whole. He points to nearby operations like Cedar Ridge as doing strong work, acknowledging that Eastern Iowa has developed a small but genuine cluster of wineries, each with its own take on what can be grown and made locally. He’s quick to note that grapes reflect their terroir, meaning the same variety grown a few miles apart, or cultivated with slightly different techniques, can produce noticeably different wines. It’s less a competitive landscape than a collaborative one, with each winery offering its own regional variation on a shared set of challenges. (For a look at how another Midwest producer built its entire identity around vineyard grounds, see the story of Minnesota’s 22 Northmen Brewing Company, rising from 180 acres of lake country.)
An Open Invitation
For all the technical detail Bott can offer about grape varieties and barrel aging, what comes through most clearly is an insistence on hospitality. The winery offers a monthly public tour on the second Saturday, led by his assistant Mark and typically built around a rotating theme, but Bott is adamant that visitors shouldn’t feel limited to that schedule. If the tasting room isn’t too busy, staff will walk curious guests through the production facility informally, past the mixing tanks and bottling line, with the sights changing by season.
The winery’s quarterly wine club reflects that same philosophy of building relationships rather than just processing sales. Members receive three bottles of wine per quarter, a 20 percent discount on all purchases, complimentary tastings, and small but meaningful perks, like being handed an actual glass instead of the plastic cups used at larger music events. It’s a modest program by design, built around the idea of rewarding regulars rather than chasing volume.
Twenty years after a Corvette owner vetoed a gravel-road dream, Fireside Winery has settled into something more interesting than the original plan ever was: a working farm turned winery that grows its own fruit, pays neighborhood kids to pick dandelions, collaborates with a lavender farm down the road, and refuses to be pinned down to any single style. Bott’s closing advice to prospective visitors is simple. Come ask questions, and if the person behind the tasting bar doesn’t know the answer, they’ll go find someone who does. “We’re proud of our place, proud of our products, and we’d be happy to walk you through.”
Plan Your Visit
Fireside Winery’s Marengo location is at 1755 P Avenue, with the Amana storefront about twenty miles away; hours, event calendars, and wine club sign-ups are all posted on the official Fireside Winery website. Production tours run the second Saturday of each month, and both tasting rooms welcome walk-ins.
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