If you’re a wine drinker, you’ve probably heard of California’s Napa Valley. The region is world-renowned for its climate, where wineries grow a wide range of grapes with nuanced flavor and texture. Every year, millions of wine drinkers flock to Napa to drink world-class wines and eat in Michelin-star restaurants.
Arizona’s climate is also world-renowned — albeit for slightly different reasons. You might assume our state’s punishing heat is the last place a sensitive wine grape would flourish.
But in a recent piece for Phoenix Magazine, Craig Outhier profiled some winemakers who honed their craft in Napa, and are now making award-winning wines just a few hours away from the Valley.
And they’re not just imitating what they learned in California. As Outhier told The Show, when you drink Arizona wine, you can taste where it’s from.
Full conversation
CRAIG OUTHIER: It’s surprisingly easy to grow grapes in Arizona. I don’t mean easy — because I know growing wine grapes is not easy and farming is not easy. But in these kind of Goldilocks zones in Arizona — we’re talking 3,500 feet in elevation and 5000 feet — you can grow really nice wine grapes.
SAM DINGMAN: And if you had to — I realize this is totally subjective — but if you had to give a kind of flavor profile to Arizona wine grapes, right as distinct from Napa?
OUTHIER: Sure. The grapes that do well here are generally kind of what they call the Old World grapes and Rhone styles. Rhone is that southern region in France; it tends to be warmer. Syrah, Grenache, those kinds of grapes. They often are medium-bodied. They’re not real silky or lush, but they’ve got good structure. So tannin and minerality, that kind of thing.
DINGMAN: So there’s also this pipeline of winemakers who are coming into our state from Napa.
OUTHIER: Sure. Yeah.
DINGMAN: What made them choose Arizona?
OUTHIER: At least 20 years ago, the cost of land was minuscule, especially compared to California. You could get like an acre of land in Wilcox for a grand. I mean, it was pretty damn cheap.
DINGMAN: I’m pretty sure you can get an acorn of land in Napa for a grand.
OUTHIER: Exactly right. A kernel of land. That I think was certainly the initial appeal of Arizona. But I think what you see now are enthusiasts. You see people who are looking for a second career. Maybe they’re retired. This is kind of the new profile of the Arizona winemaker.
They’ll be like, “You know, we’ve got a little money. Let’s buy some land.” Maybe they take a class at the Southwestern Wine Center up at Yavapai College. They just make a go of it. Maybe it’s not profitable in the outset, maybe never. But certainly a nice lifestyle.
DINGMAN: Yeah. So that makes me think about this term that I encountered in your piece that I had never heard before, which is the “third plane.” Tell us what the third plane is.
OUTHIER: I kind of got that secondhand. Now, that’s from Pavle Milic. If you have been eating and drinking in Arizona and specifically Phoenix for any amount of time, you probably have come across this guy.
He got into winemaking himself. He actually lived in Napa for a while, worked in the food and beverage industry, got to know a lot of winemakers, kind of planted the kernel in his own head of starting a winery, and now he’s done it down in Elgin, which is a town in southern Arizona near Sonoita, and this is kind of where you find a lot of the best wineries in Arizona. And that was his phrase. And that is the moment where, you know, you’re wine tasting and you realize how well and what can happen when you pair wine with food and both simultaneously uplift each other.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. What was interesting to me about that is that I believe this is still Milic that you’re quoting here. One of the other things that he says he has tried to bring back with him is he says, “My pet peeve is apathy, and that region has none of it. And we don’t tolerate it here,” speaking about his own properties.
OUTHIER: Yeah, exactly. I think that to me spoke to focus. The idea that you’re not just creating a volume wine that people can drink in volume amounts in your tasting room then move on. It’s so hard to get a winery off the ground, and it’s still in its infancy stage down there that you need to be emotionally invested to make it worthwhile.
DINGMAN: I have the sense — and tell me if you think this is a misunderstanding — that a lot of the wine culture in Northern California emanates from the fact that environmentally it is such an ideal place to grow wine. And while there are strong personalities who have shaped the culture there, it’s mostly the opportunity to grow and make money off of really good wine that has created that world.
OUTHIER: Right.
DINGMAN: From the way you’re talking about it and from the way you write about it, I have the sense here that though it does turn out that our climate can produce some really good wine, the culture and community is a little bit more people-driven.
OUTHIER: Definitely people-driven.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. And I wonder if that will lead to a just a different way of wine culture taking shape here so that it’s less about — like it’s almost like a religious pilgrimage to go to California.
OUTHIER: Right, right.
DINGMAN: Here, it seems like it’s almost more like going to a carnival or something.
OUTHIER: Yeah, right. It is. Maynard James Keenan just unleashed this crazy pyramid-like ziggurat wine production/restaurant. It has a motorized carriage that takes you up to the top. I mean, it’s nuts. It’s definitely more of a Tod Browning “Freaks” kind of thing.
It’s like, why are you doing this in Arizona? There’s still that mindset out there, even as great as the wines have gotten. So yeah, it does have that oddball misfit thing going on that, Napa doesn’t have. They’re the gold standard.
But yeah, it’s sort of like having a movie industry in Boise or something. You could make amazing movies there, but everyone’s always going to cock an eyebrow, which is great. I hope they always cock an eyebrow at Arizona wine when they figure out it’s good. That’s that’s kind of the fun of it.
Pavle had a great line in that story. He told me you go to California, and the environment is much more hospitable to a wide range of grapes. You look at the grapes off the vine there, they look like they’ve just been to the spa. You know? You come here and the grapes karate chop you. Because they’ve struggled, right?
DINGMAN: Do you think you could describe, like in the mouth, what that karate chop tastes like?
OUTHIER: Yeah. Now, that one I think is — I’m not sure if the third level is clicked for me to that extent. Because I’ve heard it over and over again: You can taste the struggle. I think that means if you just want to break it down, maybe into its scientific components, at that elevation that we make wine here in Arizona — 3,500 to 5,500 feet maybe — you do get a lot of UV rays. And I understand that the skins are thicker because of that. So you do get maybe over-structured wines if you don’t know what you’re doing or you don’t barrel them right, or do all those little tricks and magical flourishes that winemakers do.
And maybe that’s what they mean. But all those things just add up into a grape that struggles, but like a great playwright, sometimes struggle in life is what turns a grape into a great wine.
DINGMAN: Well, I don’t know if the Elgin Tourism Board is listening, but “taste the struggle.”
OUTHIER: That’s right. Taste the struggle.
DINGMAN: You can have that one for free.
OUTHIER: I can see it on a billboard.
