The Verde Valley Wine Festival will celebrate the local wineries and growers of the Verde Valley community on Saturday, May 20, at Riverfront Park in Cottonwood.
The festival will host over 20 wineries and vendors with accompanying live music. The festival benefits the Arizona Wine Growers Association and the Verde Valley Wine Consortium, both nonprofits that work to support the Arizona wine industry.
The Arizona Wine Growers Association was formed in the mid-1980s by a group of residents in Sonoita who wanted to go into the viticulture business but found that state law made it difficult for residents to obtain a domestic farm winery license. The AWGA got its start as a lobbying organization.
The board is volunteer-led and made up of winery owners, growers and winemakers. AWGA participates in several community events each year, with the proceeds funding further grassroots organizing, and now works closely with the Arizona Office of Tourism to put local wineries on the map. Its efforts include the placement of road signs in viticultural areas to guide tourists to wine-related destinations. At the Verde Valley Wine Festival, the AWGA will help put on the auction and fundraising dinner.
Kris Pothier, president of the Arizona Wine Growers Association and co-owner of Chateau Tumbleweed, strives to make Arizona wine known throughout the state.
“We happen to be in a really awesome location in the state, which is very helpful,” Pothier said. “The thing that’s neat about selling and making wine in Arizona, beyond the fact that we produce lots of different kinds of varietals and the fact that people come here for tourism anyway, is it’s a natural piece of the climate.”
The Verde Valley is an American Viticultural Area, a designated wine grape-growing region that requires wines bearing the appellation to be made from at least 85% of grapes grown within the region. There are two other prominent grape-growing regions in Arizona.
The area is rich in geological history and contains a wide variety of soil types, including limestone, sandstone and fertile alluvial deposits near the Verde River. The altitude ranges from 3,000 to 5,500 feet.
Viticulture in the Verde Valley has been experiencing slow but steady long-term growth.
“I think we’re going to continue to grow the way we’re growing,” Pothier said. When she first moved to the Verde Valley 18 years ago, she estimated that there were about 10 or 12 wineries in the valley. Now there are around 110 domestic farm winery licenses.
Pothier referred to an article that had termed the Verde Valley the “big small wine region,” since it doesn’t produce large quantities of wine like some viticultural areas.
“I continue to imagine we will stay at a relatively boutique level but the standards of our wine and the way that they’re responded to on a national stage is really high,” Pothier said. “I think it creates waves in the United States of America wine industry that we’re producing so many interesting varietals and serious wines, although we don’t make tons. I don’t see us going into this huge national scale. When people say this is the next Napa, that’s such a misnomer. It’s a very different landscape.”
