MyBiz: Amana business owner had early experience

AMANA - Les Ackerman grew up in a wine cellar.

'I was born in 1951 and my parents started the winery in 1956 when I was five years old, so I was raised literally helping my dad,” Ackerman recalled. 'My first job was picking rhubarb.”

In those days the family winery produced two kinds of wine. 'My dad made 300 gallons of Concord grape and 300 gallons of rhubarb wine, and that was it.”

After high school, Ackerman went off to college and became a school teacher. He taught for two years before returning home to take over the family's business in 1974, and he and wife Linda have been operating the winery ever since.

Ten employees assist in the daily retail operation, which is housed in a historic building that was built in the 1860s. The Ackermans remodeled the building and moved the business in 2001.

Exotic fruit wines include black raspberry, mango or pomegranate just to name a few. Grape wines include Riesling, Concord, Catawba, a white grape wine called Niagara as well as Pinot Grigio and a Merlot.

The Ackermans do all the wine production. One day he will do the filtering and technical balancing, and the next day they could be bottling a couple thousand bottles.

'It's a great job,” he said. 'No two days are alike.”

Ackerman buys his wine juices from all over the country and the fruits come to him in all forms.

'Each fruit has a different grower, or comes from a different state,” he said. 'They may come to us as juice. Some come in chunks in pails and some come in drums. It just depends on how we buy it.

'Last week when we made mango wine, we pressed 4,000 pounds of mangos that came from southern Texas,” Ackerman explained. Mangos are work intensive because they have to be peeled and cut into chunks. 'This time we bought them in 28-pound pails so that when they thawed, the juice didn't run off.”

Ackerman Winery has established its own niche in the marketplace.

'All the fruit wines we finish sweet,” he said, adding that they do make some drier wines.

Priced in the $8.95 to $12.95 range, the winery's marketing philosophy is geared toward the Amana experience.

'We think if you take the Amana experience out of Amana, you'll have no reason to come here, so we purposely do not do a lot of wholesaling,” he said. 'That's our business plan and that's what we have stuck to. We have a very loyal customer base that will travel from all over to come to us.”

An adjacent cheese shop, Heritage Wine, Cheese & Jelly Haus, sells over 30 varieties of domestic and imported cheeses, sausages, gift gadgets for the kitchen, jams and jellies, honeys, mustards, oils and teas. That's in addition to offering samples of the winery's full line of sweet wines to customers seven days a week.

AT A GLANCE

l Owners: Les and Linda Ackerman

l Business: Ackerman Winery/Heritage Wine, Cheese & Jelly Haus

l Address: 4402/4406 220th Trail, Amana

l Phone: (319) 622-3564/(319) 622-3379

l Website: www.AckermanWinery.com

l Know a manager or company in business for more than a year that would be ideal for 'My Biz”? Contact Chelsea Keenan at Chelsea.Keenan@thegazette.com.