High-altitude winery touts taste of Colorado

ESTES PARK — Candice and Erik Mohr took some big chances. A bunch of them. “White-knuckling it,” she calls it.

So how did Snowy Peaks Winery in downtown Estes Park become so successful over 14 years? Was it luck? Was it savvy?

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If you go

Snowy Peaks Winery
292 Moraine Ave., Estes Park
970-586-2099

Snowypeakswinery.com

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“Either that or we were really young and stupid,” she said. “I’m not sure which of that is true.”

Maybe it was some of all of that plus “a lot of really, really hard work,” she said, especially because “banks try really hard not to laugh at you. We did it with credit cards. It was a little hairy for a year or two.”

But the key, she said, has been that “the wines are good. That’s the most important thing. Luck isn’t the right word; Erik just has a gift for making wine.”

Tourists and locals alike revel in Erik’s gift as they sample the winery’s more than a score of award-winning varieties, all handcrafted from Colorado grapes, and they can pair them with brie, Haystack Mountain goat cheese, crackers, jams and jellies from the shop in front for picnics in nearby Rocky Mountain National Park or to savor while enjoying live music on Friday afternoons — just off the main room in colder months, or on a lower-level outdoor patio in summer. Meanwhile, their children can play in the building’s designated “No Wine-ing Zone.”

The wines themselves are like children to the Mohrs.

“We spend a lot of time with them, raising them up,” Candice Mohr said. “Erik particularly likes doing the blends. A lot of creativity and personalization goes into that. I’m just fascinated and amazed by how these things happen and flavors happen. I’m amazed by the process.”

Erik’s amazement at the process is how it all began for the Mohrs.

“My husband and I are both ecologists by training,” Candice Mohr said. “He owned an ecology consulting firm in Arizona, where we met. After I got out of college, Erik and I decided to move to Colorado, where I grew up.

“Erik’s business partner decided to work in vineyards and wound up loving it so much that he worked his way up from cellar worker to winemaker, and then he went back to Arizona and started a winery. We went to visit him in 2003, right around the time he was opening, and thought, ‘Wow, he’s crazy’ — but two months later, Erik said, ‘You know what? We should start a winery.”

He asked for a winemaking kit for Christmas, and the next year the couple brought 30 gallons of grape juice home from the Western Slope in their Subaru. Erik made his first batch of wine, “and that turned out pretty good,” she said.

After some seminars and support from groups such as the Colorado Association of Viticulturists and Enologists (CAVE), the couple in November 2004 began looking for a place to open their winery.

“We used to live in Stove Prairie, and initially we were looking in Big Thompson Canyon,” Candice Mohr said. “We kept looking up the canyon until we eventually ended up in Estes. It was a really long commute, but the best choice for business sustainability.”

Now, she said, “Erik makes the wine, and I make the wine go away.” She oversees the tasting room, the staff, the wholesale business, advertising, marketing and more. She’s been booking the live music since 2013 and scheduling events such as “vertical wine tastings.”

“That’s where you taste the same wine over different vintages,” she said, “as opposed to a horizontal tasting, where you taste different wines from the same region or the same winery.”

She has managed to get Snowy Peaks wines into some Estes Park restaurants such as Twin Owls Steakhouse, the Other Side and the View at Crags Lodge, and runs another tasting room and mini wine bar within Liz & Jo’s boutique in the Stanley Village shopping center.

She even sells wines and holds weekly tastings in summer at a little kiosk in the KOA Campground. “A lot of older people are RV’ing now,” she said, “and they’re wine drinkers too.”

Downstairs at Snowy Peaks are 55-gallon barrels where red wines are aged for one to two years, and metal vats where white wines age for about six months.

There have been a few adventures down there, she recalled.

“We’ve had some wine floods, little wine waterfalls,” she said. “We’ve lost control and had an inch of wine on the floor. And one time Erik knocked a valve off the bottom of a tank. That was horrible because he was there by himself. He had to hold his hand over it, and that wine is 40 degrees and the winery is at 57 degrees, so he was getting hypothermia. He had to tell me how to set the pump system up and pump it out into an extra tank.”

In future years, the couple faces some decisions, Candice Mohr said. “We’ve reached capacity of the winery, so we need to figure out how to manage that and if we want to try to increase production and sales or just stay where we’re at.”

But whatever they do, Snowy Peaks Winery will remain a labor of love for the Mohrs — illustrated best by the label on their Rhône-style reds, which features a painting of a valley in the national park by local artist Jeff Leg. That valley, called Moraine Park, is where Erik and Candice were married.