RAISE A GLASS FOR THIS CLASS
How students in a college winemaking program produced the best wine in Arizona
When the vineyard was planted on campus in 2010, on a hill next to the racquetball courts, the idea was to teach students real-life lessons about growing grapes.
The conversion of those racquetball courts into a working winery introduced hands-on experience making wine.
By 2015, the Southwest Wine Center at Yavapai College opened a tasting room offering the public a chance to sample its offerings in a setting that let students hone customer service skills.
Now the students will be learning a new lesson: How being named the state’s best wine affects sales.
Judges in the 2019 azcentral Arizona Wine Competition named the 2018 Southwest Wine Center Viogner as Best In Show, the top wine in the statewide competition.
The fragrant white wine was made from grapes grown on the grounds of the college in Clarkdale and processed in the on-campus winery housed in what was the college’s racquetball courts.
For Michael Pierce, who directs the winemaking program at the college, the award was unexpected. But he said the quality of the student-made wine should not be a surprise.
“There’s no excuse not to make a good product with how much energy the students bring,” he said Friday night, moments after the announcement. “We’ve got a nice (vineyard) site. We’ve got nice facilities. You’ve just got to put those together and support one another and you’ll get a good product.”
The Southwest Wine Center has won other accolades in the contest in previous years. It won the Growers Cup for Best Rosé in the 2017 contest and has picked up other medals for its wines in previous years.
“My students care,” Pierce said. “They’re so passionate about what they’re doing … that they end up pushing us far beyond what I thought we would do.”
Is it this yeast? That’s part of the course
The winemaking courses attract a mix of ages and life experiences. There are professionals looking for another change as they near retirement and 20somethings looking to get in on the ground floor of a new career option suddenly available in their state.
Lorene Tussey, a student at the college who holds a day job in information technology in Phoenix, beamed at the ceremony, while clutching one of the many awards the Southwest Wine Center won on Friday night.
“I helped make these wines,” she said. Tussey, who already has a bachelors and a masters degree in engineering, travels to Clarkdale, a town tucked between Jerome and Cottonwood, for classes and practicum work in the vineyard and winery.
“We were making wine on the first day of class,” she said.
On one of her first days in the winery, she said, Pierce asked her what yeast should be used for a batch of grapes. The question stopped her short. She remembered telling him: “Uh, this is my first or second time in here.”
She said Pierce gave her materials to read on the different types of yeast and then talked her through the choices.
“He gave us enough information to make decisions,” she said. “And if we were really out of bounds, he pulls us in.”
Another student, Mitch Levy, said that Pierce rarely said no to students’ decisions. There are boundaries, but Pierce gently guides students away from them.
“He lets you fix your own mistakes,” Levy said.
Levy had been in the Arizona wine business for a decade when he decided to take classes at Yavapai College. He has completed the program and feels he has a firm grasp of wine making from vine to bottle.
“I understand it from start to finish,” he said.
‘Everybody elevates everybody’
The Southwest Wine Center wines compete in the marketplace with the winery Levy runs, Burning Tree Cellars. But Levy doesn’t see it that way.
“It’s not a competition,” he said. “Everybody elevates everybody.”
In the literal competition, Levy’s Burning Tree Cellars won a Best Of Class for nontraditional red blends for its 2018 The Lotus. It also picked up three silver medals and three bronze medals for other wines.
Pierce also competed with his students as he also serves as winemaker for his family’s label, Bodega Pierce. That winery won the Growers’ Cup for Best Rosé and was a contender for Best In Show.
But it joined the 219 other wines from 32 wineries that were beat out by the student-made Viogner.
The Southwest Wine Center also won two Double Gold medals in the contest.
The college’s victory earned a rousing ovation from the crowd gathered at a terrace at the Westin Kierland Resort. Wineries in the Verde Valley area have donated to the college, helping it build out its winery. Area wineries also allow students to work at their businesses as interns.
Graduates from the college have found jobs at wineries. Some started their own. Heart Wood Cellars and Laramita Cellars are among the wineries started by graduates of the college. Both of those wineries also won medals on Friday, with Heart Wood winning the Best In Class for its 2017 Syrah Reserve.
The competition, put on by The Arizona Republic in coordination with the Arizona Wine Growers Association, was open only to wines made in Arizona using Arizona-grown grapes.
Judging was held on Oct. 21 at Mountain Shadows Resort in Paradise Valley. The tasting was blind. Judges knew what type of wine they were tasting, but not who made it.
Wineries pay a fee to enter the contest. And funds left over after contest expenses — glass rental, etc. — are donated, as it happens, to the Southwest Wine Center to fund scholarships and other needs.
From the vineyards to the labels
Yavapai College started offering a wine education class in 2009, an appreciation course geared toward wine consumers.
The college then added a class on viticulture, the science of growing grapes. The next year, the college decided to plant a one-acre vineyard on the hill beside the racquetball courts.
The next step was to create a place to process those grapes and turn them into wine. The conversion of the racquetball courts into a winery began in 2013.
The next year produced the first graduating class from the college. Those students had earned an applied science degree in viticulture, the science of tending vineyards, and enology, the art of winemaking.
Southwest Wine Center operates a tasting room out of one quadrant of the former racquetball courts It is staffed by students who learn direct-to-consumer marketing as part of the college’s curriculum.
Students also design the bottles, including the artwork for the labels.
Tussey, the IT professional and budding wine student, said a photo she took graces the label of the 2018 Viogner, the wine named the best made in Arizona. “It’s an amazing feeling,” she said. Tussey said students decided whether the wines they made should be blended together or released as a single varietal. “We got to decide the fate of every varietal that we were producing,” she said.
That the Viogner was bottled on its own means the students must have thought it was good enough to release on its own, she said. Apparently, that was the right call.
Pierce, holding a bottle of mineral water at the gala while clutching the Best In Show trophy, said the award bodes well for the future of the state’s wine industry.
“It’s only going to continue,” he said. “The leaders (of the industry) will be the graduates from the school.”