The substantial growth of the Iowa grape and wine industry over the past decade resulted in the establishment of the Midwest Grape and Wine Industry Institute to investigate various cold climate grape cultivars and their potential for wine making. Unfortunately, due to the climate encountered in Iowa, we are not able to simply adopt wine making practices used in other parts of the world to achieve the best quality wines possible for our region. The project described herein focused on the production of small batches of experimental wine to evaluate cold climate cultivars and the impact of conditions on the composition of the final wines.