A stately competition; It's Colorado vs. California as the state' wine get put to the (taste) test.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Wine food & travel - Competition between Colorado wines vs. California wines

Wine, like no other drink, tells a story of time and place.

In Colorado, it's a story that's still being written. Or at least revised and proofread carefully.

"Untested and unproven. That's probably the valid perception of Colorado wine," says Ken Theobald, a Denver wine distributor who represents dozens of winemakers, including a few from Colorado, to restaurants and retailers. "We're not really known as a fine wine-growing region."

In part, that's because the state is just getting started, at least according to wine time, says the longtime Colorado resident and general manager of Classic Wines. Colorado had almost no wine industry to speak of until the 1980s. Even now, with close to 80 wineries established in the Grand Valley and in Mesa and Delta counties, the sense of a "Colorado tradition" in wine-making seems faint or even contradictory, considering places like France's Bordeaux region have been at the business of making wine for, oh, 2,000 years or so.

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Still, there are glimmers here and there of headway for Colorado's wine industry. As a long list of awards maintained by the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board attests, winemakers from the state are performing ably at tasting competitions like the 2007 San Francisco International Wine Competition, where Two Rivers Winery of Grand Junction took home a bronze medal for its 2006 Chardonnay Reserve.

"We're making wines that are better," Theobald says. "There are some Colorado wines that now compete well with wines from other places."

Still, there's a long way to go. No Colorado wine cracked the "100 Most Exciting Wines of 2007" list published by Wine Spectator magazine, for instance. And Colorado winemakers are competing for attention within a broad field. Forget France and Italy: In the U.S. alone, there are wineries in every state, with Texas and Missouri (kid you not) recently gaining credibility as sources of quality wines.

But as Colorado winemakers recover from a drought that compromised some crops during the first half of the decade, they're enjoying the beginnings of recognition that seemed elusive for years.

They're also demonstrating a willingness to go sip-to-sip with one of the world's richest wine-producing regions--the northern California wine country.

TASTING EVENT

At a unique tasting event this month, wine aficionados and curious imbibers alike will get a chance to taste for themselves just how far Colorado wines have evolved.

The second annual...