Table Mountain Winery - Huntley, WY Pt. 4

I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure and wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is as we conclude our interview with Patrick of Table Mountain Winery in Wyoming. What would you like our podcast listeners to know, Patrick? Well, I think maybe the only thing to your education, your podcast, just the difference of cold hardy hybrids versus, you know, your merlots and your cabernet is basically how they take the wild branches of Native American grapes. And the University of Minnesota took that test on themselves, breeding them with vinifera. And so we do have some rays that are a direct descendant of Pinot Noir and Cabernet and some of that heritage. But they do have a lot of wild heritage to them. And that's a challenge. And marketing some of these grapes, because people are not familiar with the name and people don't understand that there are many thousands, tens of thousands of grapes out there. And so we kind of market our wines more as a, you know, the cowboy or the cowgirl blush. But then we do go into explaining how the different grapes are grown and and tell the story of how some of those grapes came to be. Everything that it's taken to get the winery started and continuing to grow. What would you say that you're most proud of? Kind of a collaboration of everything. There's still a hundred percent Wyoming growing and made and we still carry that through and even just doing the labels in-house, doing it all. So I guess not to pick one out of any of them, but just probably proud of all of them and in totality, Having so many different grape varietals. Have you done anything crazy with them? One of our craziest grapes that we grow and we have two of them. One is the Valiance, which is one of the original Coulthart, the hybrids developed by I think it came out of South Dakota, but basically took wild grapes growing up in Montana and then along the river basins, sort of trying to breed that domestically. And so we do in the vineyard fight with the wild aspects, if you will, of the grapes, because they don't grow like vinifera, they grow for survival. And so we're constantly pruning. And sometimes the more you prune them, the angrier they get. So the grapes themselves have a unique and different story on top of how we came to be to You know, you've got a lot of different combinations of grapes and the merging of things together and the experimentation process to make your wine. The University of Minnesota, I guess, is kind of the flagship. But in the 80s, they started a grape research program inspired by a retired horticulturalist, Elmer Swenson. I think you could call him the grandfather of Midwest or the last chapter of grape growing in the US. But he was able to basically breed all these hybrids together and get grapes have started to produce. And then the University of Minnesota took a step further and really what next level and started introducing Vinifera, the European line into some of these wild week stock and coming up with hybrids that are able to survive. Our winters grow and ripen in a very short season and produce wine. Before we close out the episode. Just poking around your website. And one of the last things that I found was patent night. Tell me about that. We were able to partner with a studio and one of the larger towns in Wyoming, Casper, they were able to open up the paint company. But in Wyoming, liquor licenses are limited and we as a winery have three that we can use throughout the state. So we basically opened up a tasting room in that city next to a paint studio to help them are some thirsty customers. And as part of that, we fell into the paint franchise as well and started doing them here at the winery. And that was a very big boost because, again, we are in the middle of nowhere compared for most people say. So even for locals, we are 20, 30 minutes out in the country. And so by being able to add some events such as the and steps on the weekends really has helped us bring people out to the winery. Our website is very simple. It's WIO wine, dotcom, wireline, dotcom, in terms of Wyoming wine, our socials, our app while wine on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all those good ones. And then our phone number is three oh seven or five nine zero two three three. The twenty one year coming out of covid, we are actually planting a new vineyard despite us saying we would never plant another great vine again. But we did. The few varieties that tend to intrude there, I think it was the 20, 20 vineyard and a few varieties there just started at 20 years, showing a lot more winter chill. And we lost some vines from different varieties. So we're actually planting a new vineyard this summer or spring, and it will be with a grape called the Itasca, which is one of the newer hybrids that the University of Minnesota.