Winemaker Rod Keeling tasting a very young 2009 Viognier
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How do I schedule a tasting? The most important thing for the visitor is to make sure we’re here. We need a heads up. We need to make sure we don’t have something else already going on, other people we’ve made commitments to. Often people will drive up to the gate and they’ll call me on the phone and we’re in Phoenix. Of course we don’t want that to happen. So they just need to call in advance on the landline or on the cell phone.
Where can I find your wines? We're in about 60 locations in Arizona. To see a current list click here.
Where are you located? We are located in the far southeast corner of Arizona. Our address is Pearce, but we’re about 25 miles east of the town & 12 miles south of the Chiricahua Monument. For a map click here.
Are there still home sites available? Yes. In our Rock Creek Vineyards Estates development there are 4 home sites that will become available this fall (2009).
How long have you been making wine? 2009 is my 11th year of making wine and my 5th commercial year.
Do you have any home winemaking experiences you’d like to share? We made wine at home for 6 years before we started making wine commercially. We found though that making wine from the kits you buy at the hobby store doesn’t work very well. The wine is really pretty mediocre at best. If you want to make a good wine at home you need fresh fruit. You can buy fruit from California, but we really wanted fruit from Arizona. We would come down to Willcox early in the morning - and sometimes I’d pick the fruit myself - one day I decided I wanted 400 pounds of Sauvignon Blanc and I couldn’t quite get it done and it rained on us about two inches. I got some of the guys who were working out there at the vineyard to help me and we packed it up and put ice on it and I drove all the way back to Tempe. I had two or three of my friends show up at about 7:00 at night and we crushed the wine and pressed it in the garage until about 1:00 in the morning and got it ready for fermentation. It was a long day.
Can I come and pick grapes for my home winemaking? Yes. Since we started out as home winemakers & were lucky enough to have somebody as gracious as Al Buhl who used to own Dos Cabezas Wineworks - he provided fruit for us - we feel we too should pass that on. So we want to pass that privilege on to those home winemakers who want to put forth the effort to come out and pick their own fruit. And I have about 6 home winemakers who come and either acquire or buy grapes from us.
How do you know when your grapes are ready for harvest?
What is "punching down"?
Besides your own, what are your favorite Arizona wines? We’ll start with Callaghan Vineyards. Kent makes some great wines and I like a lot of his stuff. I like his Padres - his Tempranillo blend, and I think his Buena Suarte Cuvee as a body of work - since he’s made about 12 or 14 vintages - is pretty impressive. Doing a vertical tasting of 5 years of Buena Suarte Cuvee back at Kent Callaghan’s place in 2001 convinced me that Arizona was a good place for wine.
I like Dos Cabezas Wineworks. I like Todd Bostock’s work. He’s got some really nice white wines. His new Picpoul Blanc / Viognier Blend - 2008 Meskeoli - is very good. I think Wine Spectator rated it 88.
I like Page Springs Cellars. I think Eric Glomski is a good winemaker and a good farmer.
There are several others, but those three really stand out.
There are 7 or 8 wineries in Arizona now that are consistently submitting to Wine Spectator. There are 7 or 8 labels with about 20 wines that have been ranked - just in the past couple years - above 85. That’s pretty impressive. I don’t think there’s any other non-California, Oregon, Washington State out there that’s doing that well right now.
What are your favorite wines from other regions?
How would you describe your terroir? I’m not sure exactly what that word means. But I do know that this is a place with a unique confluence of clones of the varietals we’ve selected, the rootstock, the soil and the climate along with the winemaking style all come together and make it different. I like Paso Robles wines but they’re just different other than the fact that they have big flavors and high alcohol. They’re different. I think the wines here can be very complex, and that’s just part of the terroir.
Do you let your grapes spontaneously ferment or add yeast? We ferment in 1.5 ton fermenters, so we have many small batches. If some of those display a fairly active fermentation early on I’ll add nutrients and let the native yeasts go to work. The only thing we let the native yeasts work on is the Syrah, and it has fermented with as much efficiency as the commercial yeasts. So we let some spontaneously ferment but not all. We want to add layers of flavor to the wine and I think different yeasts add to that.
What qualities are you trying to get from your yeasts? Some yeasts are better at extracting tannins, some are more floral. Our native yeast is more fruit forward. The GRE yeast we use on the Grenache and Mourvedre is very fruit forward, and we get a tremendous nose because of that. So we use different kinds of yeast, and we’ve experimented since day one. And we’ve rejected some yeasts. They didn’t do what we wanted so we just don’t use them anymore.
Do you culture your own yeast? No. We buy our yeast from the laboratory. They are isolates of yeasts from different regions.
Is your wine natural or organic?
How would you describe your winemaking style? It’s still evolving, but what we’re trying to shoot for is multiple styles. We have so much Syrah that I think we’re probably going to end up making different styles. We have a Reserve that’s in barrels still. It’s more of a French style - Northern Rhone. We are also taking some toward an Australian style with American oak. But if I was going to say it in one sentence, I want the fruit to be dominant. In all our wines, I want the fruit to dominate.
Where do you get your grape vines?
Do you graft your vines or are they on their own rootstock? They are grafted by the nursery in California and grown for one year before they are sent here.
Has your wine won any awards? Well, we have been favorably reviewed by Wall Street Journal in the Quadrennial Presidential Taste-Off last year. And our 2007 Grenache received an 86 rating in Wine Spectator magazine, and our 2005 Syrah won a bronze medal in the Arizona Governor's Choice Awards.
Do you come from a winemaking family? No I don’t, but I do come from a farming family. Both my dad’s family and my mom’s family have been farmers in the Casa Grande area since about 1920.
What drew you to winemaking? There was no epiphany per se. There was an afternoon in 1994 when the president of the Downtown association in Tempe that I worked for took me to the one of the first wine bars in the area - P.F. Chang’s - they were one of the pioneers of premium wine by the glass before there was this proliferation of wine bars.
We went in - and I had a lot of wine before that - but I had never really had any good wine. He bought me a glass of Grgich Hills Zinfandel and it was about 8 or 9 bucks a glass, which of course I would have never bought for myself at the time. And I was just shocked at how good it was. Of course it may not have been the best wine in the world, but it was far superior to anything I had ever had before. We talked about it a little bit and he told me the story of how he had restaurants over in California - this is Roger Egan - who is now our partner in the Rock Creek vineyard. We had this wine and I thought, “maybe I could make this stuff” so I started with kits.
I bought some kits - the type you can buy at the hobby store - and of course the wine was horrible. And we graduated from there. The next year I decided I needed fresh fruit, so we hooked up with some of the farmers in Willcox, Al Buhl specifically. I went down and bought maybe 100 pounds of fruit and we made a Sauvignon Blanc and that was my first real step around 1999.
What's your business background? I started out as a professional pilot. That was my first career. I flew for almost every job except airlines. I was also a traffic reporter for KTAR radio in the 70’s. I was a flight instructor, charter pilot, corporate pilot at the end. The company I flew for decided that - since I was the only one on the staff that had been to college - I should be the Vice President of Marketing. I started to work on that and learned enough to know that I was interested in business. Then I started to work for the downtown management business - mostly for non-profits, but I worked for the state for 6 years. I worked for the Department of Commerce. I became a downtown manager and I worked for downtown business associations, primarily the one in Tempe that manages Mill Avenue. It was a $4 million non-profit business association with 45 employees.
What advice would you give to anyone planning to start a winery in Arizona?
Just bring lots of money.
Why did you pick the Chiricahua foothills for your vineyard location? We picked it as a retirement home location and the vineyard idea started after we acquired the property. We picked the spot because it’s a pretty spot, but as time passes I’m becoming more and more convinced that this is a very special place to grow wine and very possibly the best place in Arizona.
What inspired your home and winery buildings? Henry Trost and Mary Jane Colter, two early 20th century Southwestern architects, have inspired our winery building and home, both designed by Chandler architect, Mark Vinson, AIA, AICP. Renowned for buildings like the Hopi House at the Grand Canyon and the Owls Club in Tucson, Colter and Trost defined Southwestern regional style. Learn more about Arizona architecture in Landmark Buildings: Arizona's Architectural Heritage, co-authored and illustrated by our architect and good friend, Mark Vinson.
Construction on the winery was completed in October 2003 by Arizona Building Systems of Phoenix. Our home on the vineyard was built primarily by Stephen Clump of Mascot Homes of Willcox. Jan and I moved in to our home December 2008.
