Estes Park’s Snowy Peaks Winery for sale

ESTES PARK — An iconic television commercial from the late 1970s featured the deep baritone voice of actor Orson Welles recalling the words of pioneering California vintner Paul Masson: “We will sell no wine before its time.”

For Candice and Erik Mohr, however, it’s time to sell their winery.

“We are just ready to retire,” said Candice Mohr, co-owner with husband Erik of Snowy Peaks Winery in Estes Park. “This was our goal: to do it for X number of years and then move on. The dream is to pass it on to somebody else who would keep it going.”

Jamie Globelnik, a commercial real estate broker at Realtec’s Loveland office, has listed the winery at 292 Moraine Ave. for sale for $2.2 million — lock, stock and, yes, barrels.

The sale price includes $958,800 for the real estate and $1,241,200 for the business. The 5,114-square-foot building includes a 2,406-square-foot tasting room, with a 2,708-square-foot production area on the lower level, which exits onto a patio where live music is often performed in summer months.

The sale includes Snowy Peaks’ current stock of wine, plus furniture, fixtures and equipment including all the wine-production infrastructure.

Candice Mohr said she hopes a buyer intending to keep the place open as a winery would also keep on as an employee Tristan Coriell, who she said has been trained by her husband for seven years.

Coriell “knows how to make our wines, and his hope is to stay on,” she said. “We just hope to find somebody who’s smart enough to keep him and keep on the legacy.”

That legacy began for the Mohrs when they opened Snowy Peaks Winery in 2005.

Erik Mohr had owned an ecology consulting firm in Arizona, where he met Candice, and the couple decided to move to Colorado, where she grew up. Erik’s business partner started a winery, and when the Mohrs visited him there in 2003, they got the idea to start one of their own.

Erik asked Candice to give him 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,” Candice said. After some seminars and support from groups such as the Colorado Association of Viticulturists and Enologists, or CAVE, the couple in November 2004 began looking for a place to open their winery. They found it in Estes Park, and opened their business the next year, largely financed with credit cards.

The business boomed with tourists and locals alike who reveled in the award-winning vintages Erik handcrafted from Colorado grapes, often pairing 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, played just off the main room in colder months, or on that lower-level outdoor patio in summer. Meanwhile, their children could play in the building’s designated “No Wine-ing Zone.”

The Mohrs aged their wines carefully and didn’t sell them before their time.

But now it’s time to sell.

“We had decided on 2024 maybe six years ago,” Candice Mohr said, adding that the couple timed it along with Erik’s planned departure from his other job, as an ecologist working with the Cedar Creek Associates consulting firm in Fort Collins.

“He had made a plan with that company to retire,” she said, “and we wanted to sell the winery at the same time.”

To the relief of its fans, however, the Mohrs don’t plan to close the business — at least not before turning over the keys.

“Hopefully we’ll just find a buyer,” she said. “We’re not in any hurry. We’re just hoping to find the right people to buy it.”

And then?

“We’re just going to take some time off and get our heads screwed on,” Candice Mohr said. “Erik’s job is super intense, and he traveled a lot. We just need to be calm for a little while.”

And for the Mohrs, it will finally be time to enjoy their vintage years.

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