Pursuits: Growing a Wine Destination in South Dakota

Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Clockwise from top left: Dave and Sue Greenlee at their Tucker's Walk Vineyard; views of the landscape, barrels and flowers at Valiant Vineyards Winery; and grapes at Tucker's Walk.

We buzzed past fields of corn and soybeans, down slippery dirt roads and around the occasional tractor. At times, my wife and I heard cattle groan and whiffed the acidic scent of manure amid a landscape dotted with peeling, wooden barns and silvery silos.

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Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Ashlee Bahnson-Kimberley sips a wine she and her husband make at Calico Skies Vineyard and Winery in Inwood, Iowa, near the South Dakota border.

This might not sound like your typical stretch of wine country, but we were indeed in the southeastern corner of South Dakota to visit wineries.

There were no marble statues or artfully trimmed hedges sitting on sprawling estates with gleaming tasting rooms. There were no locally grown merlots or cabernets or any of the classic varietals that entice oenophiles; we sampled mostly sweet concoctions made from grapes engineered to withstand the cold or local fruits like chokecherries, rhubarb and blackcurrant.

And while their wines most likely won't compete with those coming out of better-known northerly areas like Walla Walla or the Finger Lakes anytime soon, we found that what they may lack in elegance and grandeur, they make up for in homey charm, in large part thanks to the winemakers, who have mostly turned hobbies into full-time gigs and are a likable, down-to-earth bunch.

Wineries remain far down the list of tourism preferences in South Dakota, where breathtaking attractions like the Black Hills, the Badlands and Mount Rushmore reign supreme. But in recent years, they have carved a formidable niche in the state's agritourism market as landowners increasingly shun traditional cash crops for more exotic fields of fruits.

Over the past five years, the number of wineries in the state has increased from 15 to 25. The state's winemakers are expected to produce a total of more than 105,000 gallons of wine this year, breaking six figures for the first time — a far cry from the 230 gallons produced 16 years ago, when the state had just one winery. Wineries are reporting large increases in visits, and tour companies have recently started offering bus trips to wineries.

For the first time, the Baumberger Vineyard and Winery in Dell Rapids welcomed four busloads this summer, said Julie Baumberger, who runs the winery with her husband, Pete. Winemaking started as a hobby for Mr. Baumberger 20 years ago, but this year he and his wife have harvested 25,000 pounds of grapes, their largest haul yet. Visitors to their farmstead have come from as far away as Norway, Denmark and Australia, Ms. Baumberger said, adding, "It's really a unique way to meet with people and share kind of a fun experience with them."

There is a concentration of wineries in the Black Hills, but many are also clustered in this part of the state, a short drive from its largest urban hub, Sioux Falls. They provide the perfect excuse for vacationers to explore somewhere other than the scenic western part of the state, which is exactly what my wife and I did over two days late this summer.

Most of the wineries are on the very farms where the owners — and, sometimes, their cows or chickens — live. A tasting can feel like having tea in a friend's living room, if for no other reason than some of the tasting rooms are in houses or barns. The production facilities are equally pared down, often in garages cluttered with plastic buckets and tubes, and apparatuses for labeling and corking bottles by hand.

But the most intimate part of the experience is the conversation. Without crowds of guests to cater to, the vintners are eager to chat, sharing stories about how they turned a hobby into a dream job, about how they came up with label names like Sneaky Pete or about how a neighbor helped to capture their runaway Afghan hound by jumping from the back of a moving pickup truck to tackle it. Lost in a good story, a five-flight tasting can quickly turn into six or seven ("Just try this one for fun").

These chats also yielded valuable tips.

Adrienne Lewis, a host at Valiant Vineyards, the winery and bed-and-breakfast in Vermillion where we stayed, directed us to a hidden oasis along the Missouri River. We wound through tall corn pastures and down a gravel road before finding the narrow trail that opened to a vast, sandy beach along the river's banks with lush, wooded hills as a backdrop: a coastal paradise in the middle of the country. We plopped camping chairs down in the sand and enjoyed a bottle of rhubarb wine as the sun glistened off the rippling water.

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