There's no getting around it, I'm wild about Colorado wine.
But it took me some time to realize that. When I moved here from the East Coast in 1982, the words "Colorado" and "wine" seldom appeared in the same sentence. This was God’s country and ski country. It certainly wasn’t wine country.
Several years later, when I discovered that Colorado actually had a wine industry, I was skeptical. But I was also intrigued, so I set out to learn about what was then a virtually unknown aspect of the state.
I learned that Colorado wines were made not just from grapes, but from cherries, peaches, apricots, plums, apples, and pears grown primarily on the Western Slope, in Mesa County’s Grand Valley and in nearby Delta County. I sampled the limited offerings then available and was hooked by a Riesling from Colorado Mountain Vineyards. And I’ve been singing the praises of Colorado wines ever since.
Obviously, I'm not the only one. From the time I began following the growth of the Colorado wine industry, the number of licensed commercial wineries has increased from one to forty-one. Vineyard acreage has reached an all-time high of 500 acres. The state has secured two coveted American Viticultural Area appellations (Grand Valley in 1990 and West Elks in the Hotchkiss-Paonia area in 2001). And in fiscal year 2000-2001, Colorado's wine industry topped $5 million in sales. Not bad for a state that, thirty years ago, was making practically no wine at all.
Now I’ve got my eye on what may become Colorado’s newest wine-growing region, a section of the Arkansas River Valley from Salida east to Cañon City and Florence that was historically a major apple-producing area. Whether it can now become a center for large-scale, commercial wine grape cultivation remains to be seen. But several industry leaders, growers, and winemakers believe its future looks bright.
The
Winery at Holy Cross Abbey opened in summer 2002 with former
California winemaker and wine consultant Matt Cookson at the helm.
This winery, located on the grounds of Holy Cross Abbey in
Cañon City, will crush the first grapes from its own vineyard
in fall 2005.
Another major player in the Arkansas Valley’s grape-growing aspirations isn’t a winery at all. It’s the Colorado Department of Corrections, which has planted 25 acres of grapes at its East Cañon Complex in Cañon City under the supervision of Jean La Perrieré, the patriarch of Arkansas Valley grape growers.
While its potential for grape cultivation remains unproven, the Arkansas River Valley is already turning out excellent wine. Mountain Spirit Winery, until recently the area’s only winery, has earned national and international awards each year since its first 1995 release. Because Mountain Spirit’s location—twelve miles west of Salida at an 8,000-foot elevation—precludes on-site grape cultivation, owners and winemakers Michael and Terry Barkett use Western Slope grapes and fruits to craft grape wines, fruit wines, and their specialty—unique wine blends made from both grapes and fruits.
Yesterday’s Wine
Grape cultivation and wine-making are nothing new for Colorado. Settlers in the Grand Valley realized the area’s potential as a fruit-growing region as early as 1883, planting pears, apples, peaches, cherries, plums, and grapes near the aptly-named town of Fruita. Sixteen years later, the U.S. Department of Commerce reported a Colorado grape harvest of 586,300 pounds and a wine production of 1,744 gallons. But Colorado went dry in 1916, four years before the national Prohibition statute took effect. By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, Colorado’s wine grape vineyards had been completely uprooted.
The industry began rising from its own ashes in 1968 when Denver periodontist Gerald Ivancie started making wine from California-imported grapes at his Ivancie Winery. More importantly from an industry standpoint, Ivancie began experimenting with plantings of premium wine grapes in the Grand Valley. In the early 1970s, vines were also planted under the Four Corners Project, a state-funded experiment to test the economic feasibility of commercial grape cultivation and wine production on the Western Slope.
When Ivancie’s winery closed just as the first Colorado-grown grapes were becoming available, the late Jim Seewald and his wife Ann, founders of Colorado Mountain Vineyards, saw an opportunity. They purchased the grapes themselves, producing their initial release of Colorado wine in 1978. Two years later, the Seewalds moved their winery, which is now called Colorado Cellars, to the Grand Valley hamlet of Palisade. Determined to make as much wine as possible from 100-percent Colorado-grown grapes, these industry pioneers planted their own 2.5-acre vineyard adjacent to the winery. With the release of their first “estate bottled” wine several years later, the Seewalds proved that Colorado was once again ripe for grape-growing.
Today, nearly 75 percent of the state’s vineyards are located in the Grand Valley, with another 20 percent in adjacent Delta County and its North Fork Valley of the Gunnison River. These vineyards are at elevations of 4,000 to 7,000 feet—7,000 feet is considered the limit for wine grape cultivation—making them among the world’s highest.
With the Western Slope firmly established as Colorado’s premier grape-growing region, industry professionals are cautiously optimistic about the Arkansas Valley’s potential.
“The Arkansas Valley is just starting out, and [the growers] are learning as they go,” says Doug Caskey, executive director of the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board, which promotes the state’s wine industry through its support of agriculture, marketing, and research. “In that sense, you can compare it to where the Grand Valley was a decade or two ago. So this could well become another Colorado wine-growing region.”
But the biggest challenge to the Arkansas River Valley’s “grape expectations” can be summed up in one word: weather.
“The differences in growing conditions between the Arkansas Valley and the Western Slope all relate to climate and nothing else,” says Dr. Horst Caspari, Colorado State Viticulturist and an associate professor at Colorado State University.
Grapes need lots of sunshine to ripen to maturity and to build natural sugars. They also need cool evenings and nights to help retain the acids essential to premium wine-making. Grape-growing “microclimates”—a combination of soil conditions along with such factors as altitude, slope angle, drainage, and orientation toward the sun—are so crucial to wine grape development that vines grown in essentially the same location, but at slightly higher or lower elevations or with minor changes in soil composition, can vary significantly in quality. What wine grapes definitely don’t need—or like—are rapidly changing temperatures, a hallmark of weather conditions on Colorado’s Front Range.
“Extreme fluctuating temperatures are typical for the Front Range. We don’t have such fluctuations on the Western Slope,” Caspari explains from his office at CSU’s Orchard Mesa Research Center near Grand Junction. “East of the Rockies, cold air masses come down the eastern side of the mountains. Being on the Western Slope protects us from that.”
“The weather is more consistent in the Grand Valley,” Caskey agrees. “On the Front Range, you can have warm weather one day and a freeze the next. The grapevines say, ‘Oh, OK. It’s spring,' and begin producing—and then it snows.”
While that makes grape cultivation in the Arkansas Valley “a more risky business,” says Caspari, “it can be done.”
Both Caskey and Caspari see site and variety selection as keys to successful Arkansas Valley grape production.
“Site selection is crucial, so you have to be more site-specific,” says Caspari. That means planting on slopes less prone to temperature fluctuations, as opposed to low-lying areas where cold air settles.
And both lean toward planting hybrids—a cross of two grape varieties—as opposed to vinifera grapes. Of European origin, Vitis vinifera is the chief source of Old World wine grapes, the most famous of which include red grapes such as cabernet sauvignon, zinfandel, and pinot noir, and white grapes like Chardonnay, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, and Sémillon.
Hybrids, which are more winter hardy than vinifera grapes, include such lesser-known French-American varieties as Seyval Blanc, Vidal Blanc, and Chancellor.
But, cautions Caspari, growers need to plant what will sell, “and most Colorado wineries prefer vinifera grapes.” So while planting hybrids might make sense viticulturally and climatologically, such an effort could be doomed without a viable market.
“The Midwest has embraced hybrids,” notes Caskey. “In Colorado, because we can grow vinifera, we do. Fortunately, we’ve been successful with it.” (That’s especially true of Merlot and Chardonnay, Colorado’s most widely planted vinifera grapes.)
“We don’t yet know what will work in the Arkansas Valley,” Caskey continues. “But to pursue the industry there, [growers] may have to go to hybrids.”
The Road Ahead
While hybrids sound better in theory, the people actually doing the planting and wine-making in the Arkansas Valley are putting their hopes in vinifera grapes because “they make better wines,” La Perrieré says simply.
“We’re going to take a chance with vinifera grapes, which are more difficult to grow, because the market for vinifera is there. . . . Hybrids are hardier, but the quality of the wines they make is not what [the general public] prefers.”
La Perrieré should know. In a career spanning more than forty years, this veteran wine industry professional has worked in virtually every aspect of the business, from pruning vines and picking grapes to serving as district manager for several of the world’s largest wine producers.
As a consultant to the Colorado Department of Corrections&#' (CDOC) grape cultivation project, La Perrieré has overseen the planting of seven acres of Chardonnay in 2001 and another 18 acres of Riesling, Merlot, and some Cabernet Sauvignon in 2002. The vines—which normally take three to five years to bear fruit suitable for wine—are being grown at 5,600 feet in elevation at the CDOC’s East Cañon Complex.
When the first of these grapes are harvested in fall, 2005, they will be marketed under the Colorado Correctional Industries&#' “Juniper Valley Products” logo. A separate division within the CDOC, Colorado Correctional Industries supervises a number of agricultural and other job-training programs designed to provide prison inmates with marketable skills.
“We’re strictly involved in the production of the grapes,” explains agribusiness sector manager Steve Smith, “and we’re infants at it at this stage. We have to see where this leads.”
While the amount of acreage that would ultimately be devoted to vineyards is still undecided, one thing is certain: A market already exists in the form of Colorado’s own wineries, which would be invited to bid on contracts to purchase the grapes.
But figuring out which vinifera varieties will be best-suited to conditions in the Arkansas River Valley will take time, La Perrieré notes.
For instance, Chardonnay and Riesling flourish at La Perrieré’s own 7,000-foot-elevation Locke Mountain Vineyards southwest of Florence, where for the past six years he has cultivated grapes that are made into wine for personal use. But his attempts to grow Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Pinot Noir there have not succeeded.
La Perrieré, who at age 85 still single-handedly works his 10-acre vineyard (“That’s what drinking wine does for you!”), originally planted his vines almost on a dare after several California winemaker friends and colleagues attending his retirement party lamented the “impossibility” of growing vinifera grapes at his high-altitude Colorado homestead.
“They threw down the gauntlet, and I picked it up,” he jokes. And since he has been successful, La Perrieré feels it should be possible, and commercially viable, to grow vinifera grapes elsewhere in the Arkansas River Valley.
“But,” he adds, “we need to see, by trial and error, which grapes will work best.”
Another firm believer in vinifera grapes is winemaker Matt Cookson of The Winery at Holy Cross Abbey. And his reasoning echoes La Perrieré’s: Vinifera grapes make better wines than hybrids.
Cookson is keeping an open mind regarding exactly which viniferas will prove most successful. With 1 acre of the Abbey’s 200-acre grounds planted with Chardonnay last year and a second acre of Riesling planted in 2002, the Abbey’s first harvest of Chardonnay in fall, 2005, will certainly give Cookson a good idea of the winery’s future direction. “If we can make Chardonnay work here, that will tell us a lot. Actually, if we can make Chardonnay work, we can make anything work.”
Cookson will attempt to boost the Chardonnay’s winter hardiness by using special growing techniques such as “double-trunking,” which can preserve vines in the event of a frost, and by delaying pruning.
And he’ll keep a close eye on the Riesling, which is his—and Caspari’s—preferred vinifera for the Arkansas River Valley. In addition to its winter hardiness, Riesling, a grape native to Germany, does well in relatively cool districts, retaining acidity as it ripens. (One problem common to Colorado-grown wine grapes is low acid levels, due to the Western Slope’s warm nighttime temperatures.) And Riesling can be made in styles ranging from light, delicate, and flowery to dry and steely to rich, honeyed, and highly concentrated.
Cookson has planted an additional “handful” of Riesling vines on an experimental basis at the Abbey-owned Trinity Ranch property near Wetmore. But at 6,600 feet in elevation, 1,000 feet higher than the Abbey vineyard, this apple-producing area is an unknown in terms of wine grapes. Cookson will carefully chart temperature and weather data before considering further planting there.
And Cookson is also experimenting with Vitis labrusca, one of the principal grape species native to North America. He has already planted a dozen or so vines of Concord and Norton, the latter an American cross, at the Abbey, and is planning to obtain additional cuttings from Concord vines growing wild in nearby Grape Creek Canyon. Judging from the number of Cañon City back yards planted with Concord grapes—a legacy of early coal-mining settlers, many of whom were home vintners of Italian heritage—the local climate and soil obviously suit this best-known and most widely planted labrusca.
In the meantime, The Winery at Holy Cross Abbey, which anticipates its first crush of Colorado-grown grapes in fall, 2003, has begun selling Chardonnay, Riesling, and Merlot wines, along with a sweet Concord wine, and a white Zinfandel made from California grapes, all finished with Cookson’s distinctive style.
And Cookson reiterates La Perrieré’s sentiments when he says that determining the grape-growing future of the Arkansas Valley will take time. “We have to plant, experiment, and then just wait and see how things play out.”
Voices of Experience
Michael and Terry Barkett of Mountain Spirit Winery already know what works for them. This family-owned-and-operated boutique winery boasts an extensive following for its varietals (wines bearing the name of the principal grape from which they are made) and its grape-fruit wine blends. The latter include the winery’s best-selling Angel Blush, a 40/40/20-percent blend of apple, pear, and raspberry wine, and its signature wine, a 50/50-percent blend of blackberry and Cabernet Franc.
Major supporters of the Colorado wine-grape industry, the Barketts purchase about 80,000 pounds—40 tons—of Grand Valley-grown grapes each year to craft their annual production of approximately 2,500 cases.
The Barketts—in his “other life,” he’s a medical doctor, author, and the current president of the Colorado State Board of Health, while she’s a specialist in computer science and medical technology and a talented rug and tapestry weaver—credit Jim and Ann Seewald of Colorado Mountain Vineyards with helping them design and set up their winery.
“The founders of the Colorado wine industry got Mountain Spirit started,” Michael declares. “We learned from the masters.”
And the masters would be proud. Mountain Spirit’s wines have received gold medals at venues ranging from the Colorado State Fair to the Southwest Wine Competition. Most recently, the winery’s 2000 Reserve Merlot and 2000 Reserve Chardonnay garnered silver and bronze medals, respectively, at the 2002 Grand Harvest Awards Wine Competition, a combined U.S. and Canadian wine competition. And the wines generally sell out each and every year.
The Wines of Tomorrow
Michael Barkett joins Matt Cookson, Jean La Perrieré, Horst Caspari, and Doug Caskey in the belief that, down the road, the Arkansas River Valley could conceivably become another American Viticultural Area, a designation allowing wineries to use a regional name on their labels which, in turn, enables consumers to identify a wine’s origin.
“It’s certainly a possibility,” says Caskey. “But we need to wait at least five years to see what the future holds.”
AVA recognition is one thing. “But it’s more important to have [grape] varieties that will mature and ripen and produce quality wines,” adds Cookson.
And if the careful viticultural expansion that’s now underway, combined with the long-term success of Mountain Spirit Winery, are any indication, more quality wine is just what’s on the horizon for the Arkansas River Valley.