The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

Can you describe for me the New Mexico scenery as you drive up to the winery? So it is a gorgeous drive. I drive from Santa Fe and it's when I first moved out here, just like this is like a Clint Eastwood film. It's so rustic. You know, you see the Mesa's as we're driving up. Then you get into the towards the Taos, you know, as you come into the Rio Grande Valley just north of Velarde, you really you're right next to the river. So you've got the Rio Grande on one side and then you have these huge mesas on the other side that are all littered with petroglyphs

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Well, New Mexico food is sort of a blend between Native American food and Mexican food is the best way I can describe it. Obviously, the red and green chili's are big, here and everyone's got their own recipe for that. So if you went to one restaurant, it's going to have different red and green in the spice level is going to be different than in the restaurant down the street. So our wine is definitely made for that sort of pairing. They're not really heavy either. So you know, some of the Napa cabs can run up 16 percent and ours are really right in between 12 and 13 percent. Just because they're lower in alcohol and because of the area, they're going to be a little bit higher in acid. So they're going to be very friendly like this. The kind of heat would go with slightly sweeter, would go great with that spicy food. So we've got actually recipes on our website. If you look under wine cider and food pairings, we'll have the hard cider, the ones that go to the hard, hard cider, the white wine, and the red wine. We've got 15. And it's working with that same chef that we use with our virtual tastings as well. So she participates in that. You're not cooking food on the property, right? We don't. But the chef that I've been talking about, she makes these makes Merlot popsicles. So we have those in our freezer. And then we also have this crostini box. She makes these homemade crostini and then blends them in with the local feta cheese and pistachios actually look pistachios from out of the dessert and local honey. So it's a really nice pairing with one of our whites. So when they get the crostini box, they get a half glass of white wine of their choice. But then other than that, we do have snacks. I mean, we try to stay local and we get local beef jerky and chips. And, you know, just something to nosh on with your tasting, Since you have such a large variety of wine and cider selections, I know it's going to be tough, but could you narrow it down to some favorites? There are two palates that we see on a daily basis. The ones that like the sweeter of the ones like the dry ones, the most popular for the dry wines. People really like the Montepulciano because it's number one at the vineyard.

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Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure.

Our featured winery is as continue our conversation with Tina Post of Post Winery and Altus, Arkansas. So since you are one of the biggest wineries in the United States, just a rough estimate, how many people have you got coming through your establishment?

Oh, gosh. We have about oh, I would say 50,000 a year in retail maybe. But we are also the largest producer in Arkansas. We are as far as size, you know, where you could put all the other wineries here together and that be about not even half of what we produce. So as far as just getting an idea, I guess size, but yeah, it’s impressive.

So to paint a picture when you come into the parking lot. What do we see?

We have a retail outlet where you can take tours, do tastings, eat and the Trellis room. And just, you know, we have a gift shop in there and around the retail, we have a picnic area. And then around it, it’s kind of work into our beds around the winery, which we have. We grow everything from cucumbers and tomatoes to all the herbs we use in the kitchen. There are places to run the dogs and stretch your legs. We also in our south part of the parking lot we have Harvest’s House members that come in they can stay overnight.

Staying overnight is obviously an added bonus if you fully engulf yourself in your experience of going through everything that you’ve got at the time that we’re recording this. We’re in the middle of the Covid -19 pandemic. And I’m just guessing that to your winery is closed as well.

Yes, we have. In fact, I’m we’re just literally trying to figure out what the new normal is going to be. And then when you ask the question, what do you see? And, you know, I was. Well, that’s what you’re going to see as far as what we’re going to be able to do. That’s really up in the air, like taking a tour through the facility. Do we have everybody in a mask which our tours are really fun because they’re a basic winemaking tour and you get to see if we’re crushing that day. You get to watch a crash. If we’re bottling, you get to watch that. It’s so it’s really an interesting tour. It’s like winemaking one-to-one. And a lot of people really appreciate getting to see the distribution center and see how that works. Education is a potent part of what we do, whether it’s about wines behind the tasting bar or just about the whole process and how nature works. You know, the different seasons. That’s one thing people do like. They’ll say, you know where the grapes. But sometimes they say that in the middle of the winter, which is kind of interesting.

So to get people, you know, this is how it works. This is how the process works and, you know, getting people back connected to the dirt, to the land, because at the end of the day, we’re farmers first to winemakers and we’re actually a winery who that actually produces are even we make cuttings. We make cuttings. And so we plant the grapes. We take cuttings from the vines because to propagate grapes you have you don’t do it from a seed. You don’t know what you get. So you do it from the wood of the vine that you want to propagate. So we make cuttings and it’s just pieces of that by. We cut and we propagate from that. And we also sell those vines and we sell the new cuttings. They’re called the new plants a year to three years old. We also sell those to other vineyards. And just people who want to cuttings and put them in gallon pots and sell them to people who want to have something in their backyard.

I mean; you have to get some of those cuttings. So I’ll go to the web site, post winery. com postwinery.com p o s t winery dot com. If you’d like to get one for yourself.

Will somebody answer that phone? Okay, it is time for our listener voicemail. Hi, Neal. From Ohio. My question is what are legs?

All right, Neil from Ohio. Here is your answer. Well, people tend to make a big deal about what they call legs, or as some people call them, tears of wine. But really, all they indicate is alcohol percentage. So you take the wine ...

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, 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 at wineries around the globe. After all, the grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is: We continue our conversation with Coco Umiker of Clearwater Canyon Cellars. The last episode you kind of touched on the topic of Brettanomyces. It's always hard for me to say it, let alone spell it. B, R, E, TT, A, N, O M Y C E S - I've never been good at spelling orally because it is so difficult to say. Iin the industry, a lot of times people refer to it as BRETT - B, R, E, TT, wine.

In looking it up, it comes from the Greek term for British fungus. You could see when you tell people how the process works at a molecular level, you can kind of see their eyes glaze over. Oh, my gosh. Getting a chemical lesson here for you. That's where the joy is, right?

Oh, my God. Yeah. I love I was thinking yesterday, actually, how just obsessed Karl. Both are with the continual learning and crafting of wine from the grape to the bottle. This has been a crazy summer and we may only have like a week to to carve off or maybe not even a full week. We might have like a weekend to carve off a somewhat of a vacation. And we're actually talking about going to a different wine area and checking it out. You would think when you make and grow wine every single day, you would want to go do something else on your vacation. But yeah, we're obsessed. And you know, that science of it to me is where the magic is. The most interesting manipulation is if you want to say that you can do in a wine as a winemaker to make different flavors, really pop to accentuate certain characteristics. Seemingly simple timing of adding oxygen timing on leaves and how you manipulate that leaves. So leaves is like all the yeast and little bits of skins and grapeseed that settle at the bottom of the barrel. You put that great must when you're done fermenting through primary fermentation, you put that grape mass in the press and you press it off and people either go to a tank or a barrel. I usually go to a barrel. You know, the press removes a majority of the skins and seeds, but not all of it. There's always little bits that get through the yeast. And a lot of times you continue fermenting in the barrel for a while through the fermentation and things like that. So when all is said and done, it settles to the bottom of the barrel in this delicious mud. It's kind of a red color usually because it takes on some of the wine color and yeast and bacteria and a little bit skins and seeds. And how you handle that leaves as a winemaker is a big deal

Because we jump back for just a second in the time frame. Was there a point because you are so young and you're starting out with this ambitious goal, was there a point when you said, wow, what kind of an epiphany we can make this work?

Yeah, it's funny. You know, nobody's really asked me that question before. My family's been here since 1916 and I'm the fourth generation. 1916?

Yeah. OK, so we're in Idaho Century Farm. Sometimes people ask me why the farms lasted and I believe it's because we've all been long-lived. My great grandparents started it. Grandma Irene ended up having to run the farm on her own. Actually my great grandfather died, but my great grandmother Irene lived to be 93. She passed it on to my grandfather, who lived to be 96. And then he was the one that Carl and I discussed this next generation with him about like the next hundred years, Grandpa, like, what did it look like for us? And then we came to him and my mom, too. So my mom is still living and grandpa and my mom really kind of handed the baton to my my husband and I. But when we asked them if we could plant that quarter acre, you know, I think most of Lewison probably thought we were kind of crazy. I was twenty two. I was like barely legal to even drink wine. You know, we didn't grow up farming. But my grandfather clearly understood that for any generation to take the reins of a farm, they have to go their own path. He had to do that when he took it from his mom. So when my grandfather took over the responsibility for the farm, he did not run it the same way my great grandmother did. He developed different crops. He developed a whole Hereford cattle operation here to supplement the farming operation. And that was all his thing. And he had to do some real convincing. I remember him telling me about how he had to kind of sell that to my great grandmother. So when we came to him and we were really excited about farming but wanted to do this different thing, he probably was the most supportive of anyone because he knew how that was. I mean. He knew that that was the reality, and so he was amazing and we planted those first signs, that quarter acre, and the major epiphany, I think when we knew we could make...

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure.

Our featured winery is we conclude our interview with Stephen Cipes, proprietor of Summerhill Pyramid Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia. As we've learned in past episodes from Stephen, it's all about making wine to its purest form, and that includes serving local and organic food in their restaurants. And what exactly does local and organic mean, and why is that so important?

It's the largest impact on global warming is the food production for the eight billion of us. This business of 30-mile-long, that's a death in the oceans. And the sprays that come over on the jet streams from Asia to North America and the amount of carbon footprint to move all these, you know, thousands of tons of food everywhere. It's got to stop. It's ruining the earth at an astounding rate. If we go back to local and organic, we're going to have a much bigger difference in our breathing the air and keeping the planet alive. One of the biggest things that impacted us is the tractor. By going up and down in the fields, all the topsoil disappeared, and now we have to put chemicals to top topsoil and these pesticides. Already, according to The New York Times, 90 percent of the insects on the planet are gone, including the bees and the butterflies. And these are our pollinators. You know, I can understand why people don't realize that every time they buy something that's not organic, they are contributing to pesticides that are killing our insect. And if we don't have our insects, we are in big trouble in our conversation.

Stephen, I could tell that you're very progressive in that you're continually moving forward and trying to perfect whatever process you're in the middle of. But in the upcoming years, what kind of goals do you have?

I would say my goal is to get other wineries to convert to organic and other food producers to convert to organic. And I've started a declaration which has a website, organic, Okanogan dot com, organic Okanogan dot com. And you can sign the declaration online. And it's even if you're from California or Brazil or wherever you're from. It shows that you know, we are anxious to be a model and make a model of being organic. So that would be my wish is that our properties with some real property are a model to the world of man and nature and the beautiful wines we produce and also then, you know, the healthy wines that we make. I see the correlation in France, the amount of cancer in children of people living near vineyards there, and their population is so much higher than ours. And I have the link on our website. It's pathetic to see all these children with their hair shaved off, and you see the coffins going down into the earth. Children, you know. For what? For chemical wine. It's ridiculous. I can't believe that one child's life, to me, is worth all the wine in the world.

The world is the way it is. And I'm sure I can't change it all in one and one day. But I'm going to try.

Well, that's good, because you're trying makes me try. And then collectively, we start to make an impact on this whole thing, start to improve the planet for everybody. All right. As we close it out, let's get all of your contact information, Stephen, and you can contact me, Steve. I'm the proprietor at 250. 764.8000 ext 199 or ext. 11. Our websites are, https://www.summerhill.bc.ca/I also have http://organicokanagan.com/ and http://alloneera.com

That's the precious one that I'm working on with my Book, All One Era, which you can get on Amazon.com. Twelve dollars and 21 cents. Wonderful. Bless your heart. Thank you for all you do. Thank you very well.

Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of the Best 5 Minute Wine podcast was produced by IHSYM. If you like the show, tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time, pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.

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