Wooden Wheel Vineyards celebrating 10th anniversary

In the early 1990s, Mike and Connie Vincent started an insurance agency in Altoona.

A decade earlier, they left the Keota farm that has been in Mike Vincent’s family since the 1850s because of the farm crisis.

“I had the opportunity to cash rent, which I did,” Mike Vincent said. “I moved out of town to get a job so I could keep the farm.”

By 2010, the insurance agency had nine offices and 18 agents, but the Vincents wanted to return to farming.

Their agency insured a winery, and that piqued the Vincents’ interest.

“We insured a winery, so we started researching,” Vincent said. “They were having fun and selling wine.”

So, they began to research what it would take to start their own winery.

“We checked the soil types and made sure we had the right kind of soil,” he said. “We researched which varieties (of grapes) to plant.”

In 2010, they started Wooden Wheel Vineyards on the family farm.

Vincent said that patience is key, especially in the early years of a winery.

“Typically, it’s not until your third season that you get a very small crop,” he said. “It’s your fifth season when you have a healthy plant, and you’re producing a full crop.

“You have to be patient, and you have to have a patient banker.”

Wooden Wheel now produces approximately 25,000 bottles of wine per year.

Vincent takes pride in the uniqueness of the wines they produce.

“We want our wines to not necessarily taste like wines,” he said. “We want our wines to taste good. We’re more oriented toward a person’s palate than what people think a wine should be. I think that’s really helped our success.”

They have fun naming their wines, which are named after various ancestors.

“Because of the origin of the facility and the farm, we name a lot of our wines after our ancestors,” Vincent said. “It’s given me the opportunity to do research.”

“The Judge” is named for Vincent’s grandfather’s brother, Earl Vincent, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives and as a federal district judge.

“Isabella” is named for Vincent’s great-great-grandmother, Isabella Clark Wright, who as an orphan of a veteran of the War of 1812, received the land grant on which the farm was founded.

Another factor in Wooden Wheel’s success is the popularity of its event center.

“The event center is the old horse barn,” Vincent said. “It was built about 1860 by my great-great-grandparents.”

He said he learned early on that the winery would need to diversity its income sources.

“One of the things we learned that a successful winery needed to have a dual cash flow,” he said. “You have to have an event center or something like that to bring people in.

“We had to do something to bring people out, and the event center was a smart way to go.”

Vincent said that the event center has been more popular than he initially anticipated.

“We rent out the facility 80-90 times a year, with 20-25 weddings a year,” he said. “It’s been surprising what the demand is for a nice facility without having to go to a big city.

“I never thought I’d be running a bar and having weddings.”

While 2020 technically marked Wooden Wheel’s 10-year anniversary, the pandemic forced them to put off any sort of anniversary celebration.

This week, they are hosting two events to mark their 10-year anniversary, or as Vincent called it, “10 years plus one.”

On Thursday, they will host a Washington Area Chamber of Commerce Alive After Five event from 5-7 p.m. at the winery, 1179 Highway 92, Keota.

On Saturday, they will host an open house from 11 a.m.-8 p.m.