Taking stock of Colorado's vines.

• Author: Taylor, Bart
• Position: Editorial

The journey to publish Colorado VINE began with a drive from Denver to Grand Junction last July. Robert Schwab, editor of Colorado Biz, and I stopped at Dolce Vita, a watering hole and great Italian eatery on Main Street, Grand Junction's version of Denver's 16th Street Mall. Being on the Western Slope and all, we eventually found our way to a bottle of Colorado wine, a Sutcliffe Vineyard cabernet, I think.

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That was the start. Of course the wine was good, surprisingly good (though I'm an armchair sommelier, at best). The more we learned about the industry, the people, the wine community, much less some of the wine, it became apparent, to me anyway, that ColoradoBiz readers would enjoy reading about one of the state's growing and vital industries, and the source of one its most refined commodities--its wines. So we've developed a supplement to ColoradoBiz to do that.

The more we snooped around, it also became apparent that VINE needed to be done. Chances are good that if you're a wine drinker, you haven't tried a Colorado wine. Of the $300 million or so of wine sold in Colorado every year, just over 2 percent of that is now made by a Colorado vintner. My initial reaction was that it should be more. It's not for a lack of commitment or investment in the industry: I learned that more than 60 wineries now call the state home; grapes have been growing in the state in support of wine production for a few decades. The connection to Colorado's agricultural heritage runs deep--wine makers are basically farmers when all is said and done.

But as Claude Robbins notes in his article in this supplement ("Colorado wine industry faces challenges"), it turns out Colorado's wine industry suffers a fairly pervasive lack of, well, respect. Some of the people with whom I spoke didn't think Colorado wine was very good. Most hadn't tried one in several years, and many of those had had a bad experience and just hadn't gone back. And despite...