The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast - Post Winery – Altus, AR Pt. 2

Post Winery – Altus, AR Pt. 2

05/10/20 • 6 min

2 Listeners

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 ...

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

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?

Previous Episode

Post Winery – Altus, AR Pt. 1

Post Winery

We head to the state that ranks number one in rice and poultry production. My wife’s favorite author, John Grisham is from the state. The state’s musical instrument is the fiddle.

You’ve got to have a fiddle in the band. What was that? You’ve got to have a fiddle in the band. Thank you, Alabama. No, we’re not talking about Alabama.

We’re talking about the only state that produces diamonds.

Arkansas is home to Post Winery, it is the largest winery in this region. It is in the top 60 as far as size goes in the United States. We produce about 268,000 gallons of wine and juice every year. My name is Tina Post and I’m one of the fifth-generation family members working here at Post. We wear several hats. Mine is managing the retail and gift shop. The Trellis Room which is our farm to table food program. I do H.R. and things like cultivating our garden for our restaurant. We’re located in northwest Arkansas really at the base of the Boston mountains Altus.

Arkansas is the site and because of where it’s located it offers some unique growing capabilities.

We actually have a recognized as a viticulture area. It’s called Altus the outer sort of cultural area and we grow 5 different species of grapes which is very unique and I think America to grow those commercially. We’re kind of where the North meets the South and the East meets the West potentially. We have the beta Spanish fruit. Like your Chardonnay and Zinfandel. Labrusca like the Niagara Delaware Concord of course falls into that category. French hybrids like save all the doll and yellow beta festivals which is the Cynthia and the great. It’s also known as Norton if you go into Missouri and they’ll call it Norton and beat us pretend to follow which are the mascot eyes. This is as far north as it grows commercially Altus, Arkansas.

So out of those 5 varieties that you mentioned do you have a favorite?

Yes. The muscadine line it’s a flagship great for us. It’s a thick-skinned grape that hangs in clusters as opposed to bunches and it is indigenous to North America. And it only grows below the Mason-Dixon line. It’s a grape that was written about oh it goes back into the 1580s when it was written about by the early colonists talking about the wonderful aroma, the Mother Vine is in North Carolina. And it is called. It’s a Scuppernong, which is a wide variety of the muscadine a lot of times people use governance synonymously with muscadine because it’s the most popular or well-known variety. It is a variety and there are white and red varieties of the mascot on and the red varieties they range in color from fuchsia to black and the white or light from chartreuse to deep bronze very nostalgic in the south and people remember p...

Next Episode

Post Winery – Altus, AR Pt. 3

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.

We continue our conversation with Tina Post of Post Winery and Altus, Arkansas, as she explains the depths they go to ensure quality control.

We take care of our vineyards and we harvest. We haul that. We bring it to the winery, which it’s just six miles away, which is really nice for the assurance of fruit quality. And then we process it. We package it. We develop the package. And we distribute to at four different levels. We know we work with brokers. We work in different states. We what we are our distributor. We also do retail. So we’re a business. And I think this is just wonderful. It makes it really interesting always to that take something from the ground to the table. And usually, that’s not the case. You’re one part of that, you know, in the process. But we literally do it from the ground to the table. You know, we built a distribution center that’s temperature controlled. We use the same refrigeration that we use for our cold fermentation tanks and our distribution centers. So everything is controlled. And, you know, with wine, that’s a big thing. You need sterile filtering. You need you know, we do liquid nitrogen drip on the line to everything to try and ensure the quality and the end being shelf-stable. You know, back in the 60s, it was very different. We had a bunch of wooden tanks and I hope over the years now we use wooden stays or wood chips for some of the things that, you know, everything’s stainless steel cold fermentation. Do you either evolve or you won’t get shelf space anymore? There’s too much competition to not make a good shelf, stable wine.

I can’t imagine that it’s an easy task. Running a winery, the size of yours, and the diversity that you have. So as a business, I’m sure you’re always looking to pivot to something new or changing, I think is the business.

Any business you always have to be reinventing yourself because the markets changed. You know, a couple of years ago for us in Arkansas, we had small farm winery laws and now we it’s opened up to national brands. That competition got fierce. It’s you know before it was a little easier because only small farm wineries could sell in your convenience stores chain accounts. And now it’s opened that. And so the competition is really fierce.

We’ll take a short break. And when we come back, Tina will tell us what Post Winery is working on for the future need to satisfy a hungry mind.

Every week, Your Brain on Facts brings you science. Why does Mint feel cold? History. King Charles. The 2nd of Spain was so inbred his family didn’t bother educating him music. Many hit songs and even entire albums were written for revenge technology. The first videogame was made on an oscilloscope in 1958 and every other topic under the sun. Look for your brain on facts, on your favorite podcast app or at Yourbrainonfacts.com

What have you got planned for the future? One of the things we’re doing is coming out with a line. It’s kind of a new series we’re putting together and we’re going to be doing. It’s going to be unique to us. Wines with a little higher price. We’re going to have smaller batches. It might be regional flavor, but it might be fruit from other areas. Like this year. We brought in fresh cabernet fruit from the Yakima Valley in Washington State.

It’s going to be one in the series, but it’ll you know, we won’t do thousands of cases. It’ll be a smaller lot. Well, it’s kind of fun if you’re the winemakers to get to do that.

And when you’re working the tasting bar to say what the latest is in our winemaker’s series or whatever, we’re going to name it, which is we’re working on that as we speak.

Will, somebody answer that phone? Well, boys and girls its time for our listener voicema...