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King’s Crossing Vineyard & Winery is owned by Rick & Karen Foster.
One question we are often asked is: How did you come up with King’s Crossing for a name.
The name has three different implications. We wanted our winery to have an old world theme and feel, and we wanted a family name. We could not come up with a good name with Foster in the name (We thought about “Foster’s American for Wine” but figured we might get sued.) Karen’s grandparents name was King which fit well with an old world renaissance theme. So we thought about a king crossing his kingdom and stopping an inn/pub. Thus King’s Crossing. The third requirement was a name that would honor God. So if you look at our labels you will see a sword. We made the sword look like a cross. The true King’s (Christ) Cross is included on all of our labels. Without Christ none of our efforts would have been possible.
We first planted the main vineyard in 2001. We planted 100 Steuben and 50 Edelweiss Plants. In addition to the plants we planted 300 Edelweiss, 300 St. Croix, and 300 LaCrosse cuttings. Each year after 2001 we would plant additional grapes. In our main vineyard we 1800 plants including Catawba, Vignoles, Foch, Syval in addition to our original planting.
In 2005 we were planning on selling our grapes to one of the local wineries. However, we could not get a commitment so we decided to build the winery. We harvested about 5 tons of grapes in 2005 and purchased 150 gallons of LaCrosse juice and 2 tons of St. Croix grapes from James Aurther’s winery near Lincoln.
In 2006 100% of our grapes came from Iowa vineyards. Starting the local tradition of creating 100% Iowa grape wines.
In 2007 we began production of fruit wine and mead. Our apple cider comes from Ditmars Orchard northeast of Council Bluffs and our honey comes from 3 Bee Honey outside of Griswold.
In 2010 we added a Rhubarb Apple wine. Here we deviated from our Iowa grown and purchased rhubarb from friend of mine in Papillion, Nebraska. While not Iowa grown it is grown less than 25 miles from the winery. However, Wild Rose Farms north of Glenwood, has planted a large number of rhubarb plants. We received 1/2 of our 2011 rhubarb from Wild Rose Farms.
In 2010 we partnered with John and Deb Scanlon and planted a new 4 acre vineyard, Bella Terre Vineyard for their Bella Terre Vineyard and Reception Hall.
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