Colorado's budding wine industry puts down roots.

• Author: Smith, Alta

Combine a passion for wine and some of the country's most beautiful country and you've got a recipe for one of the nation's fastest growing wine industries. What's happening in Colorado is gaining a reputation among wine aficionados even if it is somewhat of a secret inside the state's borders.

How do you account for a doubling of the number of Colorado wineries in the last five years to more than 60? What explains the gold medals Colorado wines are bringing home from competitions pitting them against some of the best in the world?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There are many reasons for these events, but what's happening with the Colorado wine industry can be likened to what's happening in the broader food industry. There's a growing movement away from homogeneity and toward craftsmanship, away from one-size-fits-all to individuality, away from national uniformity toward regionalization. Look at the popularity of fresh produce from farmers' markets and phenomena like the "slow food" movement which emphasizes taste and personality over fast food's grab and go.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Colorado hasn't been alone in the expansion of consumer interest in wine--all 50 states now have wineries--but it has been remarkable how fast the industry has grown here in recent years. The state has been making wine since the late 1800s, although most of those vines were ripped from the soil during Prohibition. The current industry dates back to the late 1960s and 1970s, but there still were only four wineries in Colorado in 1990. From those beginnings, the industry grew to 16 wineries in 1997, 30 to start the new millennium, and now more than 64.

Colorado is among the top 10 states in number of wineries, although it's still considered small-time compared with giants like California, which has more than 1,700 wineries. Quantity doesn't necessarily breed quality, though.

Students of wine have realized the same thing that real estate agents know. Value and quality are all about location, location, location. Wine invites comparisons, but you have trouble comparing Colorado's wine climate with that in areas like Napa. Some believe Colorado's growing conditions are more like those of France.

You'll get a lot of different opinions on the importance of what the French call "terroir," which means the environment the grapes grow in. But Doug Caskey, executive director of the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board, says Colorado's terroir, partly because of alkaline soils, is more like the ancestral home of wine, the French Bordeaux region, than is California and many other top wine-producing states.

"We get different flavor profiles than any other state because of our climate," he says. "Our weather is more like Europe." That means, Caskey says, that Colorado produces a balanced, complex Syrah more similar to what you would find in France's Rhone Valley than the fruit-forward Shiraz (same grape, different name) found in Australia or California.

About 85 percent of Colorado's grapes come from vineyards spilling down the gentle slopes along the Colorado River in Mesa County. Palisade, known for decades as the heart of the state's peach industry, now is the soul of its wine industry even though wineries are found all across Colorado. Hot days and relatively cool nights during the growing season mean natural acidity in the grapes as well as thick grape skins. The latter translates into more lush, flavorful and intensely colored wines.

The youthfulness of Colorado's wine industry means it is difficult to pin down what may be its signature wine or wines. Many people compare Colorado's industry with Oregon's but that's mostly because the two states are...