Determined vintners elevate region's profile.

• Author: Taylor, Bart
• Position: Winery market

COLORADO WINERIES ARRIVED late to the wine game. Establishing a foothold in this hypercompetitive market is now, by any measure, a daunting challenge. The fact is that more wine, better wine, is being made now than ever before.

But winemakers seem by nature a confident lot, and Colorado's are no different. Though our industry feels on-edge much of the time--weather and water see to that--there's also a persistent optimism among its members that Colorado will eventually become known for world-class wines. For their part, every vintner I've met is convinced his or her wine is the best in the state. Yet the industry can be a study in contrast as to how each pursues a sustainable niche in the world's wine market.

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Bob and Billie Witham, both fifth-generation Coloradans, are building Two Rivers Winery by the corporate playbook. There's a noticeable professionalism, an attention to detail, in most everything one experiences at Two Rivers. And an impressive compound of buildings in a French-country style--a 10-room guesthouse, wedding and conference space, wine production and storage facilities--is rising out of the Witham's grape vineyards below the National Monument west of Grand Junction. Their plan, it would seem, would be the envy of any well-run business in the state and respected in any corporate boardroom.

One's initial thought visiting Two Rivers for the first time is that that the prospects for Colorado wine are very good. Chatting with Bob Witham confirms that sentiment.

Witham got into the wine business by accident. Educated in Colorado at Metro State in Denver and at UNC in Greeley, Witham successfully developed assisted-living facilities and retirement communities for Living Centers of America, an ARAMARK company, in Texas. With an eye toward caring for both his parents and Billie's, Witham moved to Grand Junction in 1998, to develop a maintenance-free retirement community. It never got off the ground. Witham ended up scuttling the plan late that year.

"Basically, the more I got into it, the more uncomfortable I became with the plan," Witham says. "Fortunately, on the day we decided not to proceed, someone brought me a bottle of Colorado wine. The wine wasn't very good."

The experience jarred loose an observation he'd made a couple decades before, as an Air Force MP guarding presidential flights at Norton Air Base in San Bernardino, Calif. "I remember thinking that if the President's airplane carried fresh...