Todd & Kelly Bostock
Ages: 38 (Todd); 40 (Kelly)
What they do: Provide a showcase for southern Arizona wine with their Dos Cabezas label by making exceptional examples from high-elevation sites.
Backstory: The Bostocks, along with Rob and Sarah Hammelman at Sand-Reckoner, Maynard Keenan at Caduceus and Eric Glomski at Page Springs, are advancing a serious wine industry in Arizona. The Bostocks, in particular, chose an unlikely spot to do it: the remote town of Sonoita, 4,900 feet in the mountains southeast of Tucson, home to intense sunlight and summer monsoons. They’re perfect for the task — Phoenix natives who moved away (she to Redwood City, he to Seattle) before returning and becoming a couple. By then Todd had planted a vineyard in Sonoita, where the two bought winery property. Today they make an estate wine, El Campo, from Sonoita, as well as a range of wines from Cochise County and elsewhere. They’re also at the
“We grow close to 35 varieties. Everybody brought in vines for California, Oregon, Washington. Nobody thought of us.”
heart of a burgeoning avant-garde industry — even selling kegs of rosé to top Phoenix restaurants. (They’re also working on rosé in 16-ounce tallboy cans.) They farm dozens of types of grapes and are trying to add new ones like the Spanish variety Bobal, hoping to answer key questions about what Arizona wine can be. This sort of pioneering can be in short supply in modern American wine, which makes theirs a quintessential Western story.
Harvest fuel: Homemade frozen burritos from Charleen Badman at Scottsdale’s FnB, made with native seed-search beans.
Dream project: “We’d buy some automated ways to move grapes around. Otherwise we’re getting to do what we want to do.”
From the notebook: Among a large range of wines, two benchmark reds: The current 2011 of the rowdy, Tempranillo-based Aguileon ($30) from Cochise County shows fantastic freshness, while the Sonoita estate field blend, El Campo ($50), returns for the 2012 vintage with astonishing density and green-olive saltiness.
—Todd Bostock