Vintage John Sutcliffe: his Southwest Colorado wines have garnered national interest and no doubt heightened respect for the region's vineyards, but this transplanted Englishman has been more a critic than a supporter of the state's wine industry.

• Author: Smith, Alta
• Position: Biography

Close your eyes while listening to John Sutcliffe speak and your mind might very well place him in a gentleman's club in London. So it is somewhat of a shock, with your eyes open, to see this rugged outdoorsman on his ranch and vineyard in a remote Colorado canyon within view of the Navajo Indian Reservation in New Mexico. Why is this cultured Englishman--whose pedigree stretches back to schools frequented by the royal family--growing grapes and making wine in Southwestern Colorado? And what is he saying about Colorado wine that's raising eyebrows among other Colorado winemakers?

To understand how Sutcliffe, 63, came to his ranch in McElmo Canyon and started making wine, you have to go back to his roots. His history influences his winemaking and gives him a worldview that others in the state may not have. Born to an English mother and Welsh father, Sutcliffe's attachment to agriculture started at an early age because he grew up on country "farms," as he describes them. Yet his upbringing was also what many Americans would consider stereotypical for a landed gentry. Sutcliffe's father was on the board of Dunlop Ltd., one of Britain's best-known corporations.

He went to school at The Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, whose students have included Winston Churchill, Jordan's King Hussein, David Niven, Ian Fleming, and both of Queen Elizabeth's grandsons, Princes William and Harry.

After seven years of service as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Sutcliffe wanted to come to the United States to establish a career. His journey took him to Carbondale, where he found a job "punching cows" and doing general farm labor at the Mt. Sopris Hereford Ranch. After six months he went back to England to work for his father, but he left again in just a few months and returned to the U.S. Following the advice of his tutor at Sandhurst, author and historian John Keegan, he went to Reed College in Portland, Ore., which Keegan described as "the most intellectual place in America." Sutcliffe said he interspersed semesters of study with periods of work on a big ranch and "proper buckarooing in cow camps. It was the only way I could do it," he said.

While he was in Oregon in the '70s, Sutcliffe noticed a trend he was passionate about: an increasing interest in quality food. His personal contacts eventually led him to New York City, where he helped reopen the Tavern on the Green in Central Park. He became obsessed with quality food in restaurants, and helped launch 20 different establishments in New York, Savannah, Ga., and Charleston, S.C., in a dozen years.

And while in the South, Sutcliffe met his wife, Emily, a doctor. After they were married, Emily went to work at a clinic in Cortez, and from there donated time on the Navajo Reservation nearby. An apartment in Shiprock, N.M., didn't serve the couple's needs, so they...