The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast - Post Winery – Altus, AR Pt. 3

Post Winery – Altus, AR Pt. 3

05/17/20 • 6 min

1 Listener

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.

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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...

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’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.

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...

Previous Episode

Post Winery – Altus, AR Pt. 2

1 Recommendations

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 ...

Next Episode

Dry Farm Wines - Todd White - Pt. 1

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 go on a different journey. We don’t drop into a specific winery.

We are speaking with Todd White, founder, and CEO of Dry Farm Wines.

Yes. Dryfarmwines.com. The only health-focused natural wine club in the world. We’ll get into the intricacies a little bit later. But first, let’s get where the inspiration came from.

Well, Dry Farm Wines was not intended to be a business in the beginning. So I do remember a specific inspiration that was a specific wine like a Pinot Noir from Mosel, Germany, that I was drinking at Zuni Cafe in San Francisco. That led me to the exceptionally inspired by natural wines. So I wasn’t thinking of Dry Farm Wines as a business at that time. I was just had discovered quite by accident the remarkable taste and texture of natural wines. And as a result, that kind of started me down the path of investigating natural wines and at a deeper level, which eventually led to the business.

Okay. Before your mind gets too far down the road of traditional wine thinking.

The first thought from Todd is we think of ourselves as a health food company, not as a wine club. This is a health food company first. So the second point is less than one-tenth of one percent of wines in the world are naturally grown and produced.

Why do you let your mind marinate around those two thoughts? Todd continues to educate us on the philosophy of the company.

Well, I mean, nobody. We created the category of healthy wines and sort of branded, as we think of ourselves as a health food company, not as a wine club. So we just happened to sell wine, have healthy food. So no one had really captured lab testing and quantifying wine around health quantifications. So we were the first to do it. Really were the only one to do it even today. As a result, when we started educating people on what’s really in commercial wines, not just organic wines. So organic is a farming method. You can have organic wines, but they’re not natural. Natural wine is a very specific protocol and category. And it’s very rare. Less than one-tenth of one percent of wines in the world are naturally grown and produced. So natural wine is a very specific category that has a very clear and specific understanding around the world for people who are in the natural wine business. We just happen to be in the right place at the right time in trying to solve a problem from ourselves. I wanted to drink healthier, lower alcohol wines that were sugar-free and met other criteria that were of interest to me. It turns out that the same concept was of interest to a lot of other wine drinkers. And so it’s always been my feeling that regular wine drinkers, meaning that people who drink daily as I do, people who drink wine every evening, most of them think they probably drink too much. Right. And so offering them a lower alcohol alternative that’s also natural and sugar-free, which is of interest to our customers. There just wasn’t any offer out there in the marketplace that did so, combining that with a long public speaking television appearances. You know, Podcasts that have aired to millions of people and our business just grew very rapidly. And also, as people tasted the wines, you know, they taste better. And so that’s sort of what led to us becoming one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. That concludes Episode 1 of our conversation with CEO and founder Todd White of Dry Farm Wines in our next episode.

There are 76 additives approved by the FDA for the use and winemaking, and not all of them are good for you. We’ll get into that next time. But first, it’s time. Boys and girls for our listener voicemail. Hi, this is Amber from