Scott High of Colterris joins me to talk about an exciting new space opening soon in Palisade: Colterris Collections. On June 23rd, Colterris Collections will open their exhibit space, housing over 16,000 pieces of wine memorabilia accompanied by fascinating stories from the world of wine. Join us to hear a few of those stories, along with the story of how Colterris came to be in Palisade!
Visit Colterris Collections at 3708 G Road or colterris.com/colterris-collections
Theme Music: Riverbend by Geoff Roper
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Transcript:
Welcome to the Postcards From Palisade Podcast. I’m Lisa McNamara. Palisade is most famous for its peaches, but there’s so much more happening in our little town. Join me as I chat with our community members to hear about how they are making Palisade a great place to live and visit.
Today, Scott High of Colterris joins me to talk about an exciting new space opening soon in Palisade: Colterris Collections. The Collections location has been open as a tasting room for a couple years, but on June 23rd, the name will be fully recognized with the opening of a space housing over 16,000 pieces of wine memorabilia.
Scott and I chat about how he got started with collecting and he shares the fascinating stories of just a few of his favorite objects in the collection. Colterris is Colorado’s largest fully Estate Grown winery, so we also chat about how Scott and his wife Theresa got into winemaking, what’s changed in the decades since they got started, and what originally brought them to Palisade.
Join us for some wild stories from the wide world of wine, on today’s Postcard from Palisade.
Lisa: I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.
Scott: Oh, my pleasure.
Lisa: And especially the pre-meeting, too. I thought that was really helpful just to see what you have going on here and kind of get the thoughts together. So thank you so much for your time.
Scott: Sure. Your enthusiasm gets me excited.
Lisa: Good. You should be excited. This is a really cool thing.
Scott: Yeah, I think so too.
Lisa: So if you could just introduce yourself and we can start there.
Scott: Okay. Well, that’s easy to do. My name is Scott High. And I grew up in Denver, Colorado. Born and raised there. Love living in Palisade.
Lisa: So we’re recording right now at Colterris Collections at 3708 G Road. And the main thing I want to talk to you about was the or is the new collection. But, first, let’s just give people a visual of this amazing room we’re sitting in, which is also new. so tell me about this room and what kind of events you’re going to host here.
Scott: Well, when we purchased the facility, we saw a potential for this room. It has a lot of nice lighting to it and it’s just the right size for a small, intimate venue for winemaker dinners, guest chef dinners, culinary student dinners, food and wine pairing events, wine educational seminars. There’s a lot of things we can do in here. The Colterris tasting room is, we added this on when we purchased the facility, and it’s just the right size for a group of people. We can seat 34 people. And one of the nice things about this room is everybody has a view of the chef working. And if the chef wants to discuss a course or something, he has everyone’s attention. He or she can visit with the people as he’s preparing things, a winemaker can stand up in front of him and talk to the entire group. No one has their back to the venue, which is really good. There’s a presentation area that everybody feels comfortable seeing it, seeing what’s going on, listening to the winemaker or someone giving a little talk. And it’s really nice. We did it in leather. The center table that seats 18 people is solid oak and it was made the 1950s, so it’s about 75 years old. And it was a conference table at the First National Bank Building of Denver in the 50s and 60s. So it’s really a cool, old table.
Lisa: Very cool. It looks beautiful.
Scott: And so everybody has a community style seating event there.
Lisa: So you call it the Tastevin Room. What is a tastevin?
Scott: So yeah, yeah. The Tastevin Room. Tastevin is something that I learned about at a fairly early age. And tastevins really developed in the 15th and 16th centuries. And wine merchants and winemakers would have to go down in these deep dark caves with no electricity. And they had to have a method to check out the color and the clarity of wine. And so they had these shiny little bright objects that would reflect candlelight very well. And tastevins were used for four or five hundred years until electricity came around and they don’t need to do that anymore. But you could carry one in your pocket. If you were in a carriage or on horseback, you wouldn’t bust. And you got familiar with your own personal tastevin. So it became a professional tool for someone in the wine trade. It was a very important thing. And we have about on 300 of them on display in the Colterris Collections and some stories to go with them.
Lisa: Wow. So that’s a good kind of intro to shift over to talking about the Collection. So that’s in the room next door to where we’re sitting right now. And you graciously gave me a little preview tour of it a couple weeks ago. And when we met you were very, very adamant that it’s a collection and not a museum. So I thought that was really interesting. What’s the significance of that distinction?
Scott: Well, when I started collecting these objects years ago, we weren’t really thinking about a museum. But they just. It took on a life of its own and people seemed to enjoy looking at these objects. So when I talked to my wife Theresa about starting this idea, I used the word museum quite a bit. And there was some reluctance on her part to use the word museum. And we discussed it and I think she’s absolutely right. For me, there’s a lot of positive connotations in the word museum. I think it as being place of education, a cultural. How should I say that? Where you have cultural appreciation and it preserves historical objects. It’s a connection to the past. So I like going to museums. Some people do, some people don’t necessarily.
But I think nowadays there’s a negative connotation to the word museum for some people. And sometimes and I think that connection or that connotation for the word museum, sometimes people think of museums as being too formal. They’ll think of museums as being stuffy, antiquated, you know, so outdated sort of feelings. And I don’t think everybody likes to go to museums. They think of it as a drudgery. Or sometimes it reminds them of having to go on an excursion when they were in elementary or junior high school. And they would have to get on a yellow school bus and then get off and stand in single file. And the teacher told them to be quiet until they went into the museum. And they had to not ask questions in the museum and they had to listen and pay attention and be attentive to the person who was gonna guide them through a museum.
So nowadays, I think at least some generations, that’s what their feeling about a museum is. So we wanted to call it the Collections. And I kind of got that idea because of the archives at the Vatican Collections. And there’s a beautiful art gallery in Napa Valley called the Collections. And so it’s a word that, we thought made sense. And so the Colterris Collections, it’s really just a private collection of our objects that I’ve created and collected over 50 years. And so I just don’t want to use something that’s going to be negative. I think when people come to Palisade and they’re on vacation, they might not be expecting to find a wine museum. So, it’s. We’re treading new water here a little bit with this.
Lisa: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Museum stuffy, old, and it definitely is not that it’s gorgeous. So how did you get into collecting? What was the first thing you found and what made you just keep going?
Scott: Well, when I turned 16, I got my driver’s license and I bought a $400 Chevrolet Biscayne, which was my first car. I was looking for any excuse to go driving around. I wanted to go visit friends. I wanted to run to the grocery store for my mother. I wanted anything I could do to get in my car and have this freedom that a driver’s license allowed at the time. So one day I happened to go down to an area in Denver called Antique Row on South Broadway. And I was perusing through an antique store and this little corkscrew caught my eye in a case. And one thing led to another, and so I worked up enough money to go buy that corkscrew. And I have it on display here in the museum.
But what happened when I obtained that corkscrew is I started doing some research about corkscrews. And one of the most interesting things I found out was before the invention of the crown cap and the screw cap and modern bottle making techniques where they were all manufactured the same size, so screw caps worked. Everything that was consumable of a liquid form had a cork in it. It was finished with a cork. So corkscrews were a lot more prevalent in society then than they are now. So women would have to carry a corkscrew in their vanity case to open their perfume bottles. And people would have to have little corkscrews in their pocket all the time if they were gonna have any tonics or medicines. And beer had corks in it and wine certainly had corks in it and spirits and everything else.
So corkscrews were something that everybody used at the time. And a lot of people in the 19th century decided they were going to try and invent a type of corkscrew that was easier to use. So there are over 3,000 patents on corkscrews. And that kind of piqued my interest. So I tried to find out more about it, and I discovered that no matter how much I learned, there was more to learn. I did. I was very fortunate one time to obtain a corkscrew that actually received the first patent for a corkscrew in 1795. So we have that corkscrew on display and it’s kind of cool.
Lisa: Very cool. So corkscrew was kind of the intro object. And I guess in a way that. Do you feel like that kind of got you started your whole wine career?
Scott: Well, my parents were wine merchants even at that time. And let’s try that again. This is frequent. This is more than it should. Well, we could go upstairs. There’s a conference room up there. Should we try that?
Lisa: Yeah. Any refrigerators in there?
Scott: This is doing it much more often than I thought. No, not there isn’t.
Lisa: Okay. Okay.
Lisa: thanks to the magic of editing, you might not be able to tell just how often the fridge and freezer were kicking on and off in the tastevin room. While this equipment is super important for the functioning of the kitchen, it is not ideal for the recording of a podcast! Fridges are my podcast nemesis. Once we moved up to the conference room, the recording went much more smoothly…
Lisa: So we were just talking about if the corkscrew was the thing that brought you into the wine industry or if it was something else.
Scott: So when I was growing up, my parents were wine merchants in Denver and I developed an interest in wine from a very early age. We would have family discussions on Sundays about wine and I would ask my dad what’s the difference between a three dollar bottle and a thirty dollar bottle? And that would lead to more information probably than I wanted at the time. But we studied wine and I remember riding my 10 speed bicycle to the public library and checking out books on wine and going to used bookstores and buying books on wine. It’s kind of an odd thing for a young person to do that. But I wanted to know why wine was, why it involved so many subjects. Why it involved history and culture and science and it just seemed to be an all encompassing subject and it was something that I enjoyed on Sunday evenings at dinner, even as a young person. My dad would make sure that we all got a little taste of the wine.
Lisa: So corkscrews, you mentioned you have a few. I would guess it’s the largest object by far that you have in the Collection, is that right? And if so, how many or how many do you have?
Scott: It is, we have probably close to 18,000 antique corkscrews.
Lisa: Wow.
Scott: And we’re going to end up with probably 3,000 or 4,000 on display. There’s a lot of duplicates and there are things that aren’t as meaningful as others, so we’re trying to put collections together, on exhibit that makes sense, that tie together for different reasons, whether they’re from the same country or the same inventor or the same time period, things like that. But I think they’re fun, you know, they’re not only a tool, but they’re fun, to look at and fun to use certainly. And it’s really odd because at Colterris I decided to go with a Stelvin closure, which is a type of screw cap on our wines, nine years ago. So I don’t need a corkscrew to open my wine. But if I did, I have plenty of them.
Lisa: That’s pretty funny. That’s actually really ironic. I didn’t think about that.
Scott: Yeah, it’s kind of odd.
Lisa: That’s pretty funny. So getting back to the collection, we had talked about maybe picking like three to five of your favorite objects and going into a deep dive on them. Is that something that makes sense that you want to talk about or.
Scott: Sure. It’s hard to narrow it down to three objects, you know, three things that I’m proud of to own. But there are some unique things and some of the things that I purchased over the years were from descendants of the person involved in that object. So, for example, I have this tastevin, once again, that was presented to Napoleon Bonaparte during his hundred days of reign in 1815, where he met his Waterloo later on in the summer. But Napoleon was out on kind of a recruiting trip. He had escaped the island of Elba in exile and he’d kicked Louis XII back off the throne. And he was trying to reamass his troops and get a lot of new soldiers because he knew the seventh coalition was going to be coming after him again. So he was trying to raise a couple hundred thousand people into his military very quickly. So he was visiting different cities and different towns and he happened to drop by a small village called Saint Jean de Braye, and it’s outside of Orleans.
And he had kind of done a favor to one of his adjutants to go to this small village because one of his loyal people was from that village. And he asked the emperor if the emperor could just go by and do a 10 minute recruiting trip and a little speech on the town hall steps. And that so that someday when that adjutant retired, he would be kind of the big man on campus. He would be the guy that they’d point to on the park bench and say that old man brought the Emperor Napoleon to our village and that sort of thing. So he wanted to see if he could talk the emperor into doing that. And I can’t imagine him even bringing up the subject. But Napoleon quickly acquiesced. They were going to go right through the village area anyway. And Napoleon parked his garrison of troops and rode his white horse into the village. He met several hundred people, around the town hall. The mayor of the town presented him with a little tastevin, believe it or not, that’s engraved with the date of the event and the fact that they were celebrating Napoleon’s visit to their city. And he presented to Napoleon. Napoleon graciously accepted it. And then when the speech was over and they walked down off the town steps, Napoleon gave it back to the mayor. He just said, I’m not taking your silver. You know, the French Revolution was just a few years ago. And the last thing I want to do is to accept something that you scraped together to do that for me. So he was appreciative gave the tastevin back to the mayor.
And I got it from, I think the seventh generation descendant of the mayor’s. And so it’s something that the emperor actually held in his hand. And it means a lot. We had an exchange student who came to Palisade High School and stayed with us for a semester a long time ago. And I showed him this tastevin, and he started to cry when he held it. He couldn’t believe that he was touching something and holding something that the Emperor Napoleon had actually done the same. So he, he teared up. And then I showed him another object that I’m very proud of. I showed him a corkscrew, a wooden handled corkscrew that was recovered from the Battle of Waterloo, in June 1815. And then this young French, student, he got angry, the tears stopped, he got angry, and he said, we should have never lost that war. And he became very, very nationalistic in his approach to the corkscrew. But he was delighted to be able to see those objects.
This Battle of Waterloo corkscrew I bought from a descendant of the man who basically helped to loot the battlefield after the battle. And at that time, French officers, generals, and colonels and above, they were provided corkscrews. And they received bottles of wine and bottles of brandy before their battles. And they would need a corkscrew to open the bottles of brandy and wine. I think they called it a little bit of liquid courage at the time for the soldiers. But the infantry and the cavalry, they didn’t need a corkscrew because they drank wine out of barrels of wine, so it was not required for them. But this corkscrew from the Battle of Waterloo actually has a French artillery symbol on it and Napoleon’s crown. So that’s how we were able to authenticate that the story I got when I bought it was true. It might be the only one in existence, I’m not sure.
Lisa: Well, that’s really cool.
Scott: Yeah, it’s pretty special. Something else I have that’s unique is, I obtained a sherry glass that had King George III’s emblem etched on it. And I wasn’t sure it was what I thought it was, but so I sent it off to the Victoria and Albert Museum about 20 years ago, and they wanted to keep it. And that told me it was real. So they wanted to keep it. It was the only one that they had ever seen that had gold dust rolled into the stem of the wine glass. And the glass blower must have done that at quite an additional cost. But they theorized that it was probably part of his King George III’s inner circle to have the gold in it. And it’s amazing that something that’s so fragile and could be broken so easily has survived that over 200 years. So it’s really a special thing, and I’m very proud to have that. I get nervous when I have to handle it and put it into the display case, but now it’s sitting pretty. I didn’t want anything to happen to that. So there’s a lot of fun things. It’s hard to narrow it down.
Lisa: Yeah. Is there anything that you’ve really wanted to collect that you weren’t able to get or anything you’re seeking that you haven’t been able to find so far?
Scott: If my wife listens, I’d have to say no, I have everything I need. I don’t think there’s anything else ever I would need in this subject. It’s hard to figure out what the next thing is that I might uncover or find. But nothing comes to mind that I really wished I had right now. No, I can’t really think of anything really, per se.
Lisa: Okay. All right. Good answer. So you just touched on a few of the objects out there. There are a lot more. And I know when you walk into the museum, there’s going to be a little bit about the history of Colterris and Palisade winemaking. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ll feature there for local wine history?
Scott: Well, what we’re doing there is we’re basically trying to answer a couple questions that someone will ask when they come in to see the Collections. And already we’ve had some sneak peeks where people have seen things. And the questions they ask are, where in the world did you get this? And how much did you pay for that? And where did this come from? How did you find this? So those sorts of questions. So in the very first display cases, when you enter the museum or the Collections, you’ll see a little bit of family history in how Theresa and I met in the wine business and how we have this common passion about the world of wine. And you’ll see a few things about places that we traveled and times that we spent out and about learning more about the world of wine and visiting famous winemakers and famous places. And it’s more about our background. And there’s a little bit about Colterris in there and a little bit about the Canyon Wind Winery that we purchased and the Plum Creek Winery that’s here at this location that we purchased for the Collections. Not an awful lot about the history of Palisade wine in there. I don’t want to start competing with the Palisade History Museum and Priscilla Walker and that sort of thing. She does a great job, and I would like to leave most of that up to her. But we have more of a worldwide view about wines, so not a lot of local history.
Lisa: So a good day would be start at the Palisade History Museum. That’ll give you the whole picture of wine in the Grand Valley.
Scott: Sure, yeah. And I love what Priscilla Walker did over there. It’s really fun to see the history of Palisade, especially displayed the way she did it.
Lisa: Walk me through the space. It’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s a very big room. Beautiful chandeliers, shiny floor, shiny cases, lit up artifacts. How do you want a visitor to experience this space and what’s their visit going to be like?
Scott: Well, I think some things that I’d like for people to know about would be that, we designed the display cases here locally and we had them fabricated here locally. And all the components for the display cases were made here. We had Osburn Cabinets do the melamine inserts, and we had SSD Plastics make all the glass fronts, and The Glass Brokerage did the shelving, and Clemmer Welding did all the displays. And so we wanted to be 100% local, if possible. Theresa had the chandeliers custom made, and they’re fine art chandeliers. They’re traditional but yet modern. They have a modern twist to them. And we wanted to provide some lighting up there. But I’m very proud of the fact that we have different sorts of lighting. And it’s all on dimmers. We have track lights that point up into the architectural clouds that absorb the sound. We have track lights that illuminate the floors in front of the cases. Everything seems to be very clean.
And we have little areas where the display cases, you can fall into a little pod area where there’s four or six display cases around you and you can enjoy those for a time and really not see anybody else necessarily in the next pod of display cases. So there are nine or ten of those pod areas where people can kind of get immersed into those subjects and really feel like they’re interacting with the exhibits themselves, which I think is fun. It’s not dusty or dirty or old or, it’s very modern and clean and efficient. And we have a lot of stories. So one of the things that I think people can do is they can work at their own pace through the museum. They can go at their own pace, where they see something of interest, they can spend more time there. If they see something that really isn’t of that much interest to them personally, they can just get an overview of it and move on.
So I did have some people who told me that they want to come and read every display case and every sign and they want to absorb it all completely. And the gentleman started looking at one case, and he spent about 20 minutes on that one case. There are 60 of those. So I’m not sure we’ll be open that many hours that day. There’s a lot to see. I think that’s the gist of it. And a lot of different stories. And I’m really proud to put those stories in there.
There’s another story that I think is really fun. Sometimes I tell this story, but I put it in writing as best I could. But there was a traveling salesperson who worked for a printing company in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. And this traveling salesperson, his job was to go see customers in different cities, particularly in the Midwest. And as he traveled around and fell into the Great Depression era, he discovered that he had to try to find the best places to eat that were the cleanest, the most sanitary, that provided the best food. Because a lot of people in the 20s and 30s were getting food poisoning. There weren’t any chain dependable restaurants. Everything was independently owned. And so he kept a little log book of the best place to have breakfast in Nashville and the best place to have ribs in Kansas City. And so he started little list. And then he ran into some other traveling salespeople that had lists. And so he exchanged lists and his list of good restaurants to eat in grew.
And so with that, a Chicago newspaper one time ran an article about his unusual hobby of collecting good places to eat in his notebooks. They wrote an article about him and his unusual hobby. And he then became inundated with letters and phone calls from people who said, they’re going to Santa Fe, where’s a good place for dinner. So he started spending almost all of his time answering letters and trying to be courteous and polite to people who wanted to know a safe place to eat or a good place to eat. And he realized that he was putting too much time into that and not enough time into his job at one point.
So in the fall of 1936, he printed up 1,000 pieces of paper that had 167 different restaurants on it. And he mailed them to everybody he knew. He put them in his Christmas cards, all of his business associates, all of his customers. And he thought, that’ll put an end to it by doing it. He’ll just put an end to it. And so he’ll provide the list and then he’ll be done with it. Well, that fueled another problem because then everybody, it seemed, wanted a copy of that list. So in the spring of 1937, he printed up another thousand. And to cover his printing costs and stuff, he sold them for a dollar a piece. And in 1937, $1,000 for 1,000 pieces of paper was a lot of money.
So that fueled the idea for him to finally self-publish a book. And he printed up a book that had, I think by that time, almost 400 restaurants in it. But he was very, a person of very high integrity. And he couldn’t be bought off. He couldn’t get a restaurant on there if someone paid for it, if they weren’t any good. So he had really high standards and people admired that. And then before long, he was selling 5,000 books a year, then 10,000 books a year. And in the course of the rest of his life, until 1960 or so, he had sold 3 million copies of this, which turned out to be a restaurant guide. And he became somewhat famous at the time. And then a cake mix company in Nebraska asked him to recommend their cake mix. And after five years of trial and error to get this cake mix the way this man wanted it, he finally acquiesced and let them put his name on the box. And his name was Duncan Hines.
Lisa: Oh my goodness.
Scott: And there really was a man named Duncan Hines. And he was not just in charge of cake mixes, but then he licensed his name for other things. Well, I have a bottle of French Beaujolais from 1953 that on the neck band says a Duncan Hines selection, just like the cake mix. And I think that’s a funny story.
Lisa: That is funny. I have to say there’s not where I thought it was going to go.
Scott: Yeah, but people don’t realize that there really was a Duncan Hines. There really was not a Betty Crocker. So it’s kind of an interesting thing. I have a fun letter that he personally wrote to some friends of his he was gonna go visit in Indianapolis in the 1940s. And he must have been a character because he asked if they still had their liquor cabinet because he wanted to enjoy some of their beverages. But he must have been a partier.
Lisa: It sounds like. Sounds like the life of the party, the one person everybody wants to go to. That’s really funny. Yeah. Not expecting that to go there. So in the room itself, when you enter, you have a beautiful bar to your right. It seems like part of the experience is also designed for someone to come in and have a glass of wine and maybe sip a glass of wine as they’re walking around too.
Scott: Right, exactly. we wanted this to be a kind of a fun place, a place that people would enjoy coming to. And we’d like for people to come back more often to, we’re going to be changing exhibits once in a while, but when you come into the museum, you can certainly have a glass of Colterris wine and carry it around, walk around. We’re going to have some benches to sit at, and we’re gonna have some cocktail tables and our wine barrels to sit your drink on when you’re enjoying the tours. And I think it’s gonna be a nice event because I know that when I used to ride those school buses, they never offered me any wine to go to those exhibits. So, yeah, it’s a wine museum. It’s a collection of historical wine objects, but you can enjoy it with a glass of wine because we are in Colorado’s wine country, so it made sense to us.
Lisa: Yeah, makes sense. So tell me about the grand opening. When does it open? What’s that going to look like?
Scott: Well, it’s, coming up pretty quickly. After 54 years of collecting these things, I finally get the chance to show them off. We are going to have a pre-grand opening for some invited guests that are mostly related to the local governments in the Grand Valley. And then we’re going to have the local Palisade industry, the other wineries, and the bed and breakfast, and the restaurateurs and people who are associated with the tourist business. We’re going to invite everybody to that regard so they can get a little preview of it. And then Monday the 23rd, we’re gonna open at 10am and then every day except major holidays from then on, we hope.
Lisa: Wonderful. And there’s an admission. Right. So there is an admission cost.
Scott: Yeah. So to defer all these expenses that we’re incurring here, we’re going to have to charge an admission and it’s going to be $20 to come into the museum for as long as you want to stay that day. And if you’re a wine club member at Colterris, it’s $15. So I think that’s reasonable.
Lisa: I’ll be having to come back a few times to see everything.
Scott: Yeah, what we want. That’s what we want to hear, Lisa.
Lisa: Is there anything else you want to say about the collection space? Like maybe any events that can be hosted here?
Scott: Yeah. After we laid it out and we had this little set of all these displays that kind of serpentine around the perimeter of the room, I looked at it and I thought, it’s a big enough open space in the middle that we could actually put some tables in. We could move tables in, have parties. We could have concert nights. We could play acoustic music in particular. I don’t think it’s a place for a big rock and roll venue, but.
Lisa: Don’t want to shake that glass.
Scott: Yeah, don’t want to shake. No, I don’t want to shake up the display cabinets. But I think we could have a comedy night, certainly. We could have, like I said, acoustic music, enjoyable evenings like that. One of the things I thought would be really fun is to bring back a little bit of a Copacabana or Coconut Grove night where we have 100 people, dim the lights down, candles on the table, have a classic singer perform for an hour or two and make it feel like the old enjoyable rooms of the 1940s and 1950s where Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and those people entertained. I think that would be a fun evening here where people can do that.
So to that end, we have one area that’s specifically laid out so we can bring a portable stage in that we have. And we put professional stage truss lighting up on the ceiling that’ll illuminate that area. And we have over 60 large, acoustic panels up in the perimeter of the ceiling around to absorb most of that excess sound. And as I alluded to earlier, we have a lot of architectural clouds that include 88 wine barrel heads that have acoustic tiles on the backside of them so you don’t see them. And they kind of hang down in different areas around the pods. So it kind of brings the ceiling down a little bit and has a little more of a feng shui sort of feel to the space where you don’t feel like you’re in a big open spaced warehouse kind of.
But yeah, we’re excited to the possibility of having events down the road. We also, we’re going to try and have some tours down the road, we’ll come to a point where we’re going to do some guided tours and we’re going to work on an audio descriptive narration where people can either get on their iPhones and search in what that display has and then they’ll hear a narration of it. And we hope to do it in multiple languages down the road.
So the next few years we have a lot of work still ahead of us, but I think we want to make this a not just a local venue, but we’d like to make it kind of a regional and a national venue. I had a gentleman visit two weeks ago from France in the wine business and he was shocked at what’s in here and he basically said he’s toured all over the world and been to a few wine museums in France and Italy and Greece and he’s never seen anything quite like this because he thought it was nice to have it a little more lighthearted and not laid out in a chronological fashion so you could just experience a lot of fun, little different things about the world of wine. He was really surprised to find this in Palisade. So I think it’s something I want the whole area to be proud of.
Lisa: Yeah, absolutely.
Scott: Yeah.
Lisa: I’ve heard of rumors that originally you were going to open the collection in downtown Palisade.
Scott: Well, to this. Yeah, you’re right. To this end we purchased what a lot of people call the depot, but it was actually the Palisade branch of the Grand Junction Fruit Growers Association. And that building then later it became the Mountain Lion Building. And it’s architecturally just a fabulous building right in the center of town. I just love the brickwork and the Italian Renaissance roof line. And it has a lot of history to it.
At one time it went over 400 feet to the west as a big packing shed that was on the railroad siding there where they processed Palisade peaches and shipped them all over the country. That burned down I think in the 1970s. But the main offices that were brick didn’t burn down and they were saved. And we still have that, but we bought that because we thought that’d be a great venue for this wine museum. And I think it would have been. But one of the problems was there just wasn’t enough off street parking. And the town proposed that I just use the streets around there to park cars. And I was starting to get some resistance from some of the neighbors, understandably so. And I understand why they wouldn’t want cars parked in front of their house all day.
So we backed away from that project, even after I had done an extensive asbestos remediation of it and had worked up some architectural plans for it and submitted them to the town. And everybody was moving forward until we started to see that there wasn’t enough parking. That was the main thing.
Lisa: That’s a bummer.
Scott: Yeah, we still own it. And as soon as this museum gets opened and rolling, we will start working on some ideas there. But if anybody has any ideas, I’m all ears. So please seek me out and let me know what you think because it is a challenging, fairly difficult place to do something with because from an engineering standpoint and stuff, we’re not sure what the foundation’s like on the building and we’re just not. It would require a lot more investigation before we do anything special with it. But I would love to preserve the building if possible.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. Oh, I can see, I love that building. I can see it from my window. And yeah, just, just want to make sure it stays. But I see the parking thing because if you look at it, you think, okay, well that land around it is part of it, but it’s actually not like, especially in the front. I think that’s technically, like, technically Peach Street.
Scott: Right. Yeah, no it is, it’s Peach Street.
Lisa: Okay. So yeah, so that’s not even part of the lot.
Scott: Exactly. The east property line basically is just after the bottom step of the building. So there is Peach Street extended there and the town is certainly willing to work with us on that. But the issue is in the existing building right now there’s just not enough square feet to make any economically feasible business operate. It’s just not big enough from a square footage standpoint. So you have to add on probably to the west. And by doing that, then that’s where the issues come in, is how much do you add on, how much parking do you leave available between the building and the next property line to the west. And it’s challenging. I wished it was easier to come up with an idea, but it’s challenging.
Lisa: Yeah. Interesting challenge. So you’re welcome, or you’re open to people reaching out with ideas?
Scott: Sure. Maybe they should, filter them out a little bit themselves first, but, yeah. But, yeah, it is. We’d love to do something with it and something good for the downtown area of Palisade. But it has to be compatible with the desires of the town and the neighborhood and everything. And it’s a beautiful building. We’d love to save it if we can.
Lisa: It is. Yeah. Well, I appreciate your being thoughtful about it.
Scott: Yeah. I wished I could come up with an idea.
Lisa: All right, we’ll be thinking about it. So, shifting over to you and Theresa, what originally brought you to Palisade?
Scott: Well, we came over here for a friend’s wedding. They were actually, they got married in Vail, and we decided to not stay in Vail for one of the pricey hotels. We decided to come on over to the Grand Valley. And she had never been over here before, even though she lived in Denver. And she fell in love with the area immediately. She just said it reminded her of Sonoma County 30 years ago. And she liked the rural aspect of it and not a lot of traffic lights. And certainly the agriculture was very attractive to both of us. We always wanted to have a vineyard somewhere. And matter of fact, to that end, we had looked in Sonoma county and Napa county in California, and Bordeaux, France, and Mendoza, Argentina, and the Willamette Valley. And we had looked all over for a place that we might someday have a vineyard. Growing up in the wine business and being in the wine business all my adult life, it’s a natural thing to try to figure out a way to grow grapes someday. And we saw that opportunity over here, and after the time that she. After that day she fell in love with it, there was no looking back. We actually bought 10 acres, I think within a month or two of her first visit over here. So, that’s how Colterris kind of got started.
Lisa: Okay. And I see some of the lore on the Colterris website is that you promised if Theresa would marry you, that you’d buy her a vineyard. Was that really what sealed the deal?
Scott: Well, we talked about having a vineyard someday, before we were married. And we certainly had that mutual desire. And I think I might have expressed to her that it’s more likely that I would be able to provide her a vineyard someday than a rose garden. And it’d be more compatible with my thoughts and ideas. But now she has both, because we have a rose garden and a vineyard. And so I think she, she got her, her deal there. She got what she wanted. We actually got engaged on a trip in France and Italy visiting vineyards. So, yeah, I think she’s summarized it pretty well that I did promise her a vineyard.
Lisa: I love it. So really, wine has really been the through line of your life and your life together.
Scott: Yeah.
Lisa: So Colterris is the largest estate grown wine producer in Colorado, meaning that Colterris uses your own grapes to make all of your own wine. And you’ve been around for almost 15 years? Is that right?
Scott: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s right. Yeah. Our first vintage was 2008. We didn’t release it until 2010. So I’m not sure where you start with the vintage or the release of the first wine or whatever. But yeah, we really started in 1999 when we bought our first acreage up here is where High Country Orchards and Colterris really began. The first 10 acres we bought were all peaches and the peach trees were just too beautiful and the peaches that came off them were fabulous. So we just kept that peach orchard, got into the peach business and kept looking for another plot of land that we could plant a vineyard. And now we have both.
So we’re very proud of the fact that we’re Colorado’s largest estate winery. It means a lot to me for the authenticity of the wine to actually have the grapes grown here in Colorado. Some wineries, they don’t have that same feeling and they, it’s not as important to them where their source of grapes comes from. But I think if we’re going to have a Colorado winery, we should grow the grapes. I think that’s important. So to that end, we have almost 70 acres of vines now and we’re able to supply the needs of Colterris going forward, for the short term anyway. And we have two really talented winemakers that I’m very proud of, from Colorado actually, which is nice. They were trained in California and elsewhere, but they’re really good winemakers. And we’re operating very compatibly with their abilities and our desires. So we do want to make Colterris always and only from our vineyards. That’s our goal.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s good principle. So in the past, so I’d say. Okay. So since 2008, obviously a lot has changed here in the valley and in the wine industry in Colorado and the world, really. But what do you think are some of the most kind of notable changes or surprising changes to you in the last, ah, X number of years since you’ve started making wine?
Scott: Well, it’s fun to see new wineries come into the area. That excites me when I see another winery come into the area. It saddens me when I see a winery go out of business. So I want everybody to succeed, as far as the wine business goes. I haven’t noticed a lot of changes. I mean, when I first got here, I was really. I remember the Palisade Tribune newspaper. I remembered the breakfast cafes that we used to go to, and I remember all that. I wish that Palisade was progressing faster than it has. And I’m sad with the fact that we haven’t got more fine dining places, places to eat that people would enjoy. We do have really nice ones that are here, but I guess I just want. I want it to prosper better.
I mean, other changes that. Let’s see. Well, one of the things that I think is really remarkable are the people that I’ve met here in Palisade. Looking back, at first, it was kind of difficult to be an outsider and to come in and especially jump into the peach business without a lot of background in it. I think it was challenging. And now we finally feel like we’re part of the community, so that’s a nice feeling.
Lisa: Yeah. So you personally, when you open a bottle of Colterris wine, what’s your go-to? What’s your favorite one?
Scott: Well, it depends on the situation. Depends on the food that we’re preparing or having for dinner. The older I get, the more I like Sauvignon Blanc. I just think our Sauvignon Blanc is delicious and our dry Riesling. Bo and Justin, our winemakers, I think they’re making really good wines. We had a gentleman here yesterday that worked at a winery in California, he tasted five of our wines and he bought a bottle of each. So I think that was a good thing. He liked all five of them. Saying what my favorite wine is is difficult. It’s like saying which one of my children’s my favorite, and that varies every day with their situation with me.
Lisa: I love it. You love them all for different reasons.
Scott: I love them all for different reasons. Right. They’re all they’re truly unique, just like our wines.
Lisa: That’s cute. Personally, I love the Coloradeaux, the Bordeaux style blend. It’s really nice.
Scott: Yeah, it’s really nice. That’s kind of our. I tell people that our Coloradeaux is, it’s our version of a French Bordeaux, obviously. And in the wine business in the United States, if you’re going to have a wine made from vitis vinifera grapes, it has to be 75% that particular grape variety. If you’re making wines from a different species like vitus labrusca or something, it can be 51% Concord and still be called Concord. But for our purposes, when we make a wine, it has to be at least 75% of that varietal. And to me, when I taste a wine that’s 75% Merlot, for example, and 25% something else, it doesn’t necessarily always taste like what I would expect a Merlot tastes like.
So for us to have wines that I would consider to be varietally correct in flavor, they usually have to be way up into the 85, 90, 95 percentile range of that variety. We do want to add some other varieties for complexity and to make the wines more interesting. So we add layers of flavor by adding a little bit of Malbec to the Merlot or Cab Sauv to the Merlot or Cabernet Franc to the Merlot. If we want the Merlot to really be a full bodied, rounded wine with good mid palate flavors and good finish and good aromatics and nice color.
So blended wines are really where the state of the art for winemaking falls into, especially for red wines. But sometimes the winemakers will decide that they want to make a really interesting wine or they can make a really good blend of those variety grapes and not have it be 75% of one of them. So if it’s a varietally named wine from Colterris, I can guarantee it’s way up into the 90 percentiles of that variety. So it’s typical of that variety. But Colterris Coloradeaux is a wine that the gloves can come off for Bo and Justin, and they can make whatever they want. They don’t have to hold to the 75% minimum restriction of a single grape variety. And so it’s kind of their chef special every year. Like a restaurant would have a chef’s special to keep the chef from getting bored with the same thing every day. So once a year, we pretty much allow them to blend to their heart’s content to make an interesting red wine and it truly is one of our standout red wines. Our Coloradeaux Reserve got a double gold medal last year in San Francisco. So it holds its own very well from a national viewpoint of quality. And, yeah, I’m really proud of it. I think it’s an interesting wine every year. It’s special. I’m glad you like that. By the way.
Lisa: Absolutely. It definitely allows their skills to shine. And yeah, it’s always really delicious.
Scott: It has a lot. It has a lot of flavors. And the thing about Coloradeaux, because of the complexity of the grape components of it, it’s going to age and evolve and change quite a bit in the bottle. So it’s one of those wines that will be totally different a year from now than you taste it now as the components ebb and flow. But it’s a special wine.
Lisa: Is there anything else that you want to talk about with the collection, with the winery, with anything?
Scott: Well, our hope and our desire and our goal with the Collections is that it really contributes to the valley, that it really helps the tourism in the valley that we become thought of as a more serious wine growing area in the United States. And the reputation for Palisade is already growing very quickly and very well. It’s doing great as far as the quality of our wines go here and the high altitude viticulture that we can provide for our vineyards is exceptional. I mean, we’re extracting great flavors from our red wines in particular and high acidity in our white wines. And I think we’re making wines that are going to be well thought of in the future from a national standpoint. But I really want the Colterris Collections to be something that pleasantly surprises people when they come to the valley and something that they talk about when they go home, wherever they’re from, and they go, you won’t believe what I saw in Palisade. Little Palisade, Colorado. You won’t believe what I saw. I think it’s a world class venue that is just going to surprise people. I mean, it surprised you, I think.
Lisa: Oh, yeah. I think you’ve accomplished that.
Scott: Yeah.
Lisa: It’s, the only word I could tell everyone afterwards was, wow, you’re not going to believe it.
Scott: That’s the word I heard even from two people this. Well, the gentleman from the California winery that came here yesterday, he and his wife were just touring the area and I said, I’ll give you a little sneak peek of something. He said, sure. And the first word out of his mouth was, wow. And the second word was, wow. And I think the third word was, wow. And it’s just, that. That’s the most descriptive word I can think of that it’s not what people expect. And actually, when you pull up to the Colterris Collections facility, the roof line is such for the front of it that you don’t really think there’s a big building here. It’s deceiving. And when you walk through the door, it kind of takes you by surprise.
Lisa: Yeah.
Scott: And that’s a good thing.
Lisa: Yeah, you definitely pulled that off. Well, I cannot wait to visit after the 23rd of June.
Scott: There we go.
Lisa: I’ll definitely be here. Can’t wait to check it out.
Scott: All right.
Lisa: Thank you so much for your time.
Scott: Absolutely. Lisa, thank you. We appreciate everything you do for us too. Thank you.
Lisa: Thank you so much.
Lisa: Go be pleasantly surprised by the Colterris Collections at 3708 G Road, then email me at lisa(at)postcardsfrompalisade.com to tell me how many times you said wow – I’m betting it’s going to be at an Owen Wilson level of wow.
The podcast’s theme music is Riverbend by Geoff Roper.
Thanks for listening. With love, from Palisade.