Boulder’s only winery a one-woman show

BOULDER — Carry Nation, one of the leading agitators in the American temperance movement at the turn of the century, was renowned for her violent tactics — often attacking bars and liquor outlets with a hatchet.

Her great, great niece Marianne Walter likes to joke that she’s doing her bit to restore the balance. It’s not that she’s a heavy drinker.

She does own the only winery in Boulder.

At Augustina’s Winery on North Broadway, Walter is currently nursing around 800 gallons of different wines through various stages in oak barrels and steel tanks after only her second full vintage in the business.

That volume equates to roughly 4,000 bottles of mostly varietal wines — chardonnay, cabernet franc, sauvignon blanc, merlot, riesling, lemberger and gewurtztraminer — together with a hybrid blend called Harvest Gold and some cherry wine.

Toward the end of the summer, Walter drives around Colorado collecting her grapes and then does all the crushing and pressing, winemaking, bottling, corking and labeling, plus marketing and sales.

The whole thing is virtually a one-woman operation. Her dad, Lee, motors 1,000 miles from Indiana to sleep on a couch and help her collect the grapes. Friends occasionally are bribed with pizza and wine to lend a hand when things get really hectic.

Her license requires Walter to use at least 75 percent Colorado grapes although she sources 95 percent from within the state. She and her dad — using bins wedged in the back of her old truck and his van — cart most of the grapes from the Palisade/Grand Junction region, but she also buys from small vineyards along the way in Silt and Rulison.

While Walter pours time and energy into the fledgling winery, it is still some years away from repaying her efforts with any profit, so in the meantime she takes all sorts of other jobs, often on weekends or evenings, just to help make ends meet.

From April to December (the busiest time at her own winery) she also works for Tim Merrick at the Trail Ridge Winery in Loveland, one of about 22 wineries scattered across Colorado.

And when she’s not doing that you may well find her serving coffee, cleaning houses, walking dogs — “anything which brings in money and allows me the flexible hours to run my own winery.”

Early on she tapped into Boulder’s thriving cultural and performing arts scene, offering wine tastings at dance performances, theater shows, receptions, exhibition openings, poetry readings, even at weddings.

Three Boulder liquor stores carry Augustina wines — which Walter says are “priced for everyone to enjoy” at between $6 and $13 a bottle. She also sells at wine festivals and from the winery most Sundays. She has an arrangement with Deb Evans, owner of Troubadour Bookstore, for Saturday afternoon tastings and sales.

Evans, whose Pearl Street shop specializes in books and resources related to the literary and performing arts, has previously featured Augustina wines at some of the regular functions she stages to support local artists and performers.

She is full of praise for the wines, admitting to a special fondness for the chardonnay. Evans sees good wine as a natural complement to those other fine things in life — literature and the performing arts — promoted through her store.

Walter left Indianapolis to study geology at university in Boulder and, after graduating, worked 11 years for the United States Geological Survey based in Golden.

In those days, making fruit wines was a bit of a hobby. It was the tragic death of her geologist husband in 1994 in Peru that set her on the path to her new career.

“I quit my job and found a winery in New Mexico, the Black Mesa Winery, which was prepared to take me on and teach me the trade — everything from picking grapes, to winemaking, to selling at wine festivals,” she said.

She often worked grinding, dirty, 16-hour days, plagued by bees and mosquitoes, but says it was a great learning experience. She also attended several short winemaking and viticulture courses and seminars, so when she returned to Colorado in late 1996 she was ready to go it

alone.

She started with premises in Erie but soon needed more room. In October 1997, she moved to Boulder where she shares working and storage space with Robert White, who runs Jivin Java, an organic coffee business.

It must be the sweetest smelling business premises in Boulder.

“You get the smells of grapes or grape juice or wine and organic coffee,” Walter said. “I always say if we could just get a French bakery in here it would be heaven.”

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