Quality at issue as industry numbers grow.

• Author: Taylor, Bart
• Position: From the publisher

If you didn't have time last May to pore through the Colorado wine industry's economic impact study, rest assured that your homegrown wine industry is healthy and relatively successful.

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More Colorado grapes are being grown than ever before, used by more Colorado wineries to make more wine than at any time in the state's history. In short, the impact of the industry has never been more positive.

Which is a good thing, as Coloradans are fond of wine.

Very fond.

According to the research, we drink about 20 percent more wine than the average U.S. consumer--about 3.66 gallons of wine, per person, per year. In 2004, we purchased about 62 million bottles of wine, roughly a million of which were bottles of Colorado wine. That's 16th overall out of 50 states. Cha-ching.

Colorado consumers apparently also favor U.S. made wines--87 percent of all wine consumed in Colorado in 2004 was domestic wine, compared with the national average of 75 percent. And the Bartles & James craze apparently never caught on in Colorado: 94 percent of wine consumed in Colorado was table wine, not wine coolers, champagne, or dessert wines, a number higher than the national average of 90 percent.

We in Colorado like our wine, we like our wine made in the U.S., we like it with a cork in it, and we're drinking more of what is produced here. All good for Colorado winemakers.

Almost all good, that is, since a lingering issue of quality seems to shadow the numbers.

State wineries are now producing 48 percent more wine than in '02, outpacing general sales growth of all wine significantly; 20 percent more wine overall was sold in Colorado during the same time. But the industry's market share, or the percent of wine sold in the state from Colorado producers, remains basically the same.

In 2002, 1.2 percent of the wine sold here was Colorado wine; in '05, 1.5 percent. In a growing market, with consumers predisposed to buy Colorado wine, the numbers strike me as small, as they did when I wrote about it initially last year. We're talking three-tenths of a percent improvement over three years.

The study doesn't tell us how much of the wine produced in Colorado is actually sold--basically the research views production and sales numbers interchangeably--so attributing the market-share malaise to quality is, to be fair, an educated guess.

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But with 52 percent of all Colorado wine currently sold from tasting rooms, the majority of which are on...