Grand Junction – One of the most ubiquitous bumper stickers in the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau boasts, “London, Paris, Tokyo, Moab.”
If that brand of boosterism is hard to swallow, consider how improbable the following matchup might seem: “Bordeaux, Tuscany, Napa, Palisade.”
Most folks around Grand Junction, the hub of what’s touted as Colorado’s Wine Country, aren’t given to this sort of overreaching. But with vineyards crowding out orchards and local interests uncorking more amenities, the area could be poised to decant itself as another hot destination.
“Reds, whites and greens,” one of its advertising slogans declares, alluding to the Grand Valley’s cluster of 15 wineries and to the Redlands Mesa golf course, rated by Sports Illustrated as one of the three best new courses in the world when it opened in 2002.
“This could be a mini-Napa,” allows winemaker Norm Christianson, caressing a glass of his Canyon Wind cabernet sauvignon. “But all we’re trying to be is a nice quaint little valley, with some good wine, good lodging and good restaurants.”
Quaint? That might be arguable, given Palisade’s plain-Jane, farm-town looks and Grand Junction’s desert-hugging industrial backbone. And it’s almost unfair to compare the area to Napa, given that the Colorado wineries didn’t really get going until the early 1990s – a century or more after some of their California counterparts.
But Palisade wines are starting to become as renowned as its revered peaches; a 2003 riesling from Carlson Vineyards bested more than 150 others in an international competition this year. And in Grand Junction, where the arrival of a Red Lobster was cause for celebration a decade or so ago, the offerings for visitors have improved markedly.
Two modern hotels, a Hampton Inn and
Hawthorn Suites, recently have opened on the sculpture-studded Main Street in downtown Grand Junction; a new gourmet market, B. Finicky’s, is stocking 130 kinds of cheese (think French-style picnics); and in sleepy Palisade, one restaurant now stays open through the dinner hour for the first time in perhaps 20 years.
The cultural scene has picked up, with two wineries – Two Rivers and Grande River – hosting regular concerts in the summer; an over-40 club called Boomers offering live jazz and blues; and a cabaret theater augmenting a gaggle of performing arts troupes.
On the recreational front, besides the golf course, the area offers numerous mountain biking, hiking, rafting and fishing opportunities, and a whitewater kayak park is being planned on the Colorado River at the mouth of DeBeque Canyon.
“Can’t have it both ways”
All this appears to help pull in more tourists, with receipts from the city’s 3 percent lodging tax up 17.4 percent through September of this year, compared with the same period in 2004 – one of the best showings in the state, according to Debbie Flynn Kovalik, head of the Grand Junction Visitor and Convention Bureau.
But the best indication of the area’s emergence as a place to relax and enjoy life, she suggests, may be the opening of not one, but two party-rental stores – whose tents and tables are enabling wineries to host catered tasting dinners at $50 a head.
“The quality of the experience has changed,” Kovalik says. “We’re pulling in groups like the Colorado Parks and
Recreation Association.
Before, we couldn’t get them
to call us back.”
Not everyone is thrilled with the growth of the wine industry and what it might portend for the area.
“The wineries can be a bit snobbish, if you know what I mean,” says businesswoman and longtime Grand Valley resident Jan Curtis. “And I hate to see the peach orchards go, because this area has always been known for its peaches.”
Such feelings are common in Palisade, says innkeeper Stephanie Schmid, proprietor of the Orchard House, a bed- and-breakfast place she and her late husband opened in the late 1980s, when the local economy was still suffering from the oil-shale bust.
“The greedy side says, ‘Bring it on,’ ” she says. “But I was concerned about the future of the valley, so I did a little survey two years ago and passed out a form to every fifth household.
“To sum it up, everyone wanted things to change and get better, but they wanted it to stay the same. Unfortunately, you can’t have it both ways.”
The Grand Valley, some 250 miles west of Denver on Interstate 70, extends about 20 miles from the lush, irrigated fields of fruit at the foot of Grand Mesa to the pink sandstone cliffs of Colorado National Monument.
Locals say its moderate climate and newfound status as a metropolitan area (the population now exceeds 100,000) are attracting not only more sophisticated tourists, but also more diverse and affluent residents – many of them retirees who take advantage of Grand Junction’s sizable medical facilities.
And as energy development continues to stoke the Western Slope’s economy, million-dollar homes, once a rarity in Mesa County, seem to be cropping up as routinely as roundabouts.
Still, the area faces tough challenges in trying to lure more visitors, particularly the emerging hordes of so-called culinary tourists, who regard memorable food and drink as more crucial to an enjoyable vacation than the traditional mainstays of great scenery and recreation.
Not going the distance?
The biggest barrier is Grand Junction’s distance from the state’s population centers. While the vineyards at the foot of the Bookcliffs may be only a 3 1/2-hour drive from the Front Range,”it’s not the thing people want to do on a Friday after work,” says Erik Wolf, an Oregon-based travel consultant who is president of the International Culinary Tourism Association.
By comparison, he notes, the California wine meccas of Napa and Sonoma are just an hour to 90 minutes away from San Francisco and Oakland, making a weekend excursion relatively painless and, in an era of $3-a-gallon gas, less expensive.
In addition, the resorts of Summit and Eagle counties – strung out along I-70 like baubles on a jewelry counter – are always beckoning, and “in the winter, people who don’t like driving on ice and snow to get to the ski areas won’t want to go even farther into the hinterlands,” as Wolf puts it.
Another obstacle is rising competition on the winemaking front. While the Grand Valley accounts for about 80 percent of all the grapes grown in Colorado, its 15 wineries are outnumbered by roughly 40 elsewhere in the state, including several on the Delta-Paonia side of Grand Mesa and at least one in every major resort community.
Consequently, tourists who are looking only to sample Colorado wine or pick up a bottle as a souvenir, rather than to savor the full “wine country” experience, hardly need to make the drive.
And with vineyards now planted on tracts from Loveland to Cañon City, “you can’t complain that Front Range wineries don’t grow their own grapes,” says Doug Caskey, head of the Colorado Wine Development Board, which is charged with promoting wine production statewide.
Still another problem is Grand Junction’s limited number of first-rate restaurants. While the city has the usual chain outlets and several excellent independents, including a newly opened tapas eatery called Cafe Biltmore, almost everyone agrees it needs more establishments like the Red Rose in Palisade, an Italian-Asian place so popular it can be packed even on a Thursday night. (The unpretentious spot was opened last year by a couple who spent 25 years running the former Rose’s Cafe at East Seventh Avenue and Quebec Street in Denver.)
“People who come to Grand Junction for a day of shopping or medical treatment do not want to risk trying a new local restaurant. They’ll stick to the chains,” says Dan Kirby, coordinator of a budding culinary arts program at Mesa State College.
“But if they’re coming to visit the wineries, they’ll stay an extra day and cap it with a fine- dining experience, and that’s what culinary tourism is all about.”
Nationally, the surging interest in comestibles – stoked in part by cooking shows on cable TV – has brought new cachet to rural areas such as Hyde Park, N.Y., southern Vermont, and Lancaster County, Pa., the home of “shoefly pie” and Amish feasts.
“What you see is chefs using agricultural products with place names, and that starts to put the places on people’s radar screens,” says Wolf of the culinary tourism association.
“When you have achieved a critical mass, you can market it as a mini-Napa,” he goes on. “But you can’t have shoddy hotels and poor service along with great wine. People have certain expectations, because they are always going to compare it to Napa.”
In Wolf’s opinion, Colorado’s wine country may be playing catch-up in the marketing game because it hasn’t developed either a signature cuisine or a signature wine to set the area apart from other regional centers of culinary tourism, such as Oregon’s Willamette Valley – the home of great pinot noirs.
Wayne Smith, master chef at Mesa State’s culinary academy, suggests that lamb – raised on the Western Slope since pioneer days – could readily satisfy the need for a local “brand” in food.
“New Zealand and Australian lamb is hard to compete against, but I think Colorado lamb is superior,” he says. “It’s meatier and more flavorful. The animals are moving through different vegetation with the seasons, so there’s more variety in their diet.”
Seeking a signature wine
As for a Colorado-specific wine, probably no one would nominate cabernet, merlot or chardonnay, the classic varietals most often planted when vineyards were coming into their own in the Grand Valley – but also the types that have won the greatest fame for Napa and Sonoma.
Also, while merlot was once fashionable, it has been falling out of favor with consumers since the Oscar-winning movie “Sideways” popped its bubble earlier this year.
But some lesser-known types have shown promise, among them tempranillo, a red wine that originated in a region of Spain with hot, dry summers and cold winters akin to those of the Grand Valley, and has now been produced in commercial quantities by Palisade’s DeBeque Canyon Winery.
“What’s it going to take to put this area on the map? If anybody knew, we’d have already done it,” says Canyon Wind’s Christianson, who is experimenting with pinot grigio, syrah and two varieties of bordeaux that are rarely seen in this country: cabernet franc and petit verdot.
“This is a generation game. It evolves slowly,” he says. “By the time you put something in the ground and it comes to fruition and you put it in barrels and let it spend five years in glass, it can take 20 years.”
An equally vexing issue is the rising price of land, a factor that could limit the wineries’ ability to expand grape production beyond the “boutique” level. (Colorado wines currently account for only about 2 percent of all wine sales nationally.)
With tracts of 10 acres or less selling as homesites for upward of $30,000 per acre, “you can’t buy new land and grow grapes and make a profit without doing something else,” says the wine board’s Caskey.
Considering the time and investment it takes to succeed in winemaking, it’s not hard to understand why the Grand Valley may be considered a young upstart compared to the powerhouses in California, Oregon and Washington.
But what puzzles outsiders is why – despite the wineries’ grape-friendly soils, foreign- trained oenologists and award-winning products – the area remains as little known nationally as, say, the Arizona wine country southeast of Tucson.
“They have the same thing – about 15 wineries – and a similar problem,” Wolf says. “People just don’t associate wine with Arizona.”
To help people associate wine with Colorado, Wolf recommends winemakers form partnerships with restaurants, just as they might pair wines with foods.
For starters, he suggests, the visitors bureau – which has spearheaded a series of sold- out wine-train excursions on weekends this fall – might arrange a series of wine tastings during the ski season at lodges in Aspen and Vail.
“It’s the people who come to Colorado to go skiing, and taste Colorado wine, who can start to spread the word,” Wolf says. “That gives them bragging rights when they go home, like the people who go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and also do the wine country there.”
Beyond this, he says, Grand Valley winemakers need to persuade restaurants to push Colorado wines even when their customers say they would prefer the better-known brands from California.
“To overcome consumer doubt, you have to do product sampling,” Wolf insists. “What has to happen is for the server to say, when people order California wine, ‘Actually, I’ve got a great Colorado wine. Would you like to try it?’ And if they say no, the response needs to be, ‘Well, how about a taste?’ ”
Staff writer Jack Cox can be reached at 303-820-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.
