Colorado Wine Country

Stowing our gear inside, disconnecting from water and power, hooking up the pickup truck for towing - everything went so smoothly that Nancy said, as we pulled out from our campsite in Ouray, "Don't want to get cocky, but we're really getting good at this." Thirty seconds later, when we pulled onto the road, a bumpy maneuver at that campground, one of the sliding doors between living area and kitchen jumped open and couldn't be retracted. It turned out that a screw which holds the track in place had never been seated properly, and I had to figure out how to remove the sliding door, sink the screw, and return the door to its track. So we continue to have a problem now and then, but truthfully we're delighted that on this trip they've all been minor and owner-correctable.

Colorado isn't considered a wine mecca, but there are now around one hundred wineries in the state. One of the most prominent winemaking areas is along the western Rocky Mountains. On the way to Aspen we stayed over the Memorial Day weekend at a state park near Palisade, near the center of wine country. It was an attractive campground, surrounded by impressive sandstone cliffs. Families were out for the holiday weekend. The weather was beautiful. Ah, Colorado.

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We drove into the town of Palisade and stopped at a liqour store, thinking, who better to advise us as to which wineries to visit.  The clerk didn't seem to know, but a lady customer who looked like someone who had sampled a few bottles over the years gave us a couple of names.

One of the recommended wineries was some miles out of town, past manicured fields of grapes and pretty fields of peach and apple trees. The other tasting room was a two-winery showcase in town. Our impression of the wines we tasted was that the usual varietals – chardonnay, merlot, and so on – were perfectly okay but nothing special. They also offered a number of fruit wines, and I enjoyed some of them more than I expected to. The lavender wine, however, was not a favorite of Nancy's; she detected notes of soap and potpourri.

A bartender/owner of a restaurant in Ouray had told us, when he learned we were from California, that we shouldn't expect good wines from the Palisade area, because the vines were too young, and that for a quality alcoholic beverage we should go to a brewery instead. For lunch we dropped in to a Palisade brew house and sampled some excellent local beer with our sandwiches.