Why Colorado Wine Deserves Your Attention

How Aquila Cellars is redefining what’s possible for American wine in the Rockies.

Written by Nathan Bodenstein

Photography courtesy of Aquila Cellars. © Karen Lane

When you think of Colorado, wine probably isn’t the first, or even tenth, thing that comes to mind. More likely it’s the Rocky Mountains, Patagonia-wearing craft beer fanatics or the tie-dyed Deadheads. But Brandt Thibodeaux wants to change that. Having grown up on a crawfish farm in Louisiana rather than around wine, he spent his early career guiding rafts and studying birds before landing in Colorado’s North Fork Valley in 2014. What started as a curiosity about medicinal plants turned into a crash course in natural wine, thanks, in part, to a former business partner with an extravagant 3,000-bottle cellar and a belief that good Pinot Noir could grow in the desert.

In 2018, Thibodeaux launched Aquila Cellars with little more than that same belief and a willingness to figure it out along the way. The winery sources fruit from a patchwork of high-elevation vineyards across western Colorado, some active, others abandoned; most planted by hobbyists who came from industries like oil, gas and software engineering. “We’re growing grapes in a desert. Everything’s irrigated from 100-year-old snowmelt ditches,” said Thibodeaux. “It’s not a model that’s been done at scale.”

Aquila’s wines, bright, high-acid and highly aromatic, are made with minimal intervention and a willingness to experiment. Distribution remains limited, but word has spread organically. A handful of shops in Brooklyn, DC, and Denver carry their wines. Others, he says, still won’t even taste Colorado wine. “There’s no loyalty to local,” he admits. “Even farm-to-table restaurants won’t pour wine grown ten miles away.”

The long-term vision goes beyond bottles on a shelf. After closing a short-lived restaurant on the property, Thibodeaux is doubling down on the farm itself, working toward a future where visitors can experience Colorado wine in context: the landscape, the food, the pace of life. “We want people to come here and see what this place is about. Wine is just one part of that.”

We spoke with Thibodeaux about what makes Colorado wine distinctive, the realities of pricing and sustainability and how taking risks in Colorado could open up new possibilities for winemaking in the U.S.

*This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did you first get the idea for Aquila and who inspired you in those early years?

Words can’t really describe the wild and eccentric Kevin Russell, mountaineer, world traveler, expert on the mountain tribes of Borneo, dad and caregiver to his son Alex and collector of some of the finest wines in the world. Despised by some, loved by others, Kevin relished the look on Burgundy collectors’ faces when he’d invite them into his trailer to taste wines that would stop them in their tracks.

After working at Jack Rabbit Hill for about a year, I wanted to dig deeper into Colorado’s potential as a wine region, and there was Kevin, waving his hands, gasping with excitement as he talked about Jean-Louis Chave, the Soldera family, Château Rayas and Clos Rougeard. He spoke about the “Gang of Four” in Beaujolais like they were King Arthur’s knights. He knew their vintages, their triumphs and struggles.

Kevin had this way of describing wine that made it feel inseparable from the life of its maker, the ’82 vintage being a little nervy because the winemaker had just welcomed his first child, or certain vintages that reached their pinnacle only after decades of hardship as a family finally cracked the code on how to channel the energy of their estate. For Kevin, wine wasn’t just a drink; it was life itself, a calm artistic expression in the middle of centuries of chaos, still water amidst the rise and fall of empires.

Photography courtesy of Aquila Cellars. © Karen Lane

I was green and captivated by this idea: that a wine could somehow express the energy and nuance of a place. And there was Kevin, convincing me that the Western Slope of Colorado might be the next frontier, a place that could coax out of Pinot Noir the same magic that Burgundy is known for. It felt like a grand adventure was calling.

What did it take to get the project off the ground and what was that first vintage like?

Like any wine project in an unknown region, we faced the same challenges: no money and no reputation. In 2018 we scraped together cash, bought some well-used French oak, and leased a leaky cellar built in 1930 for $250 a month. We literally pulled a nearly 100-year-old press out of an apricot tree growing into it. Then we made a 2018 vintage, 8 barrels of single-vineyard Pinot Noir, and peddled it like drug dealers on the street.

We’d pitch it to shops and restaurant owners from Aspen to Boulder, saying,“Drink this and tell us what you think. Look at what we can produce and there’s more to come.” They’d stare at us across white tablecloths, confused, like,“Who are these wackos, and what am I supposed to do with this unlabeled wine?”

How did your team evolve after that first year?

Spreading the word with the 2018 vintage gave us just enough momentum to keep going. But within a year, Kevin and our other business partner started panicking, about farming, financing and the mountain we were about to climb. They bailed at base camp.

My gut told me I couldn’t let the dream die, not after the looks some of those sommeliers gave us, not after they’d blinded the wine and mistaken it for Burgundy. That’s when Courtney reached out. She wanted to start her own project and I told her I held contracts for every organically managed and abandoned vineyard in the valley worth working with. I needed a strategic partner.

Courtney had a more traditional path, harvests around the world, pet-nat with Les Capriades, Syrah with Pax Mahle. When she tasted through the barrels and tried the 2019 Marcellina, a skin-contact wine from Pinot Gris, Gewürztraminer, and Pinot Noir, she looked up and said, “Yes, let’s do it. This is the style of wine I want to make.”

Photography courtesy of Aquila Cellars. © Karen Lane

There we were, standing in that cold, leaky cellar on the hillside overlooking Mount Lamborn. Very little capital, barely any equipment, but just enough skill and an abundance of passion to push through the years of struggle ahead.

What can you tell us about the vineyards you’re working with?

Most of the vineyards we work with are what I’d call “hobby vineyards,” planted in the late ’90s or early 2000s by people who came out here from totally different careers. A lot of them are retired engineers or software folks who decided, “I drink wine and it’s expensive, maybe I’ll grow my own.” So they put in an acre or two, sometimes three or four. One couple even planted 16 acres just for fun; that’s a pretty common story around here.

We’re currently sourcing fruit from over ten different sites, most of them small. Our estate vineyard, which I manage directly, is about 13 years old and just starting to come into its own. The oldest vines we’ve worked with were at a vineyard called Terror Creek Vineyard, most of it was around 30 years old, but one small block may have been closer to 90. That site’s in decline now. The owners converted the winery into an ayahuasca retreat center and aren’t interested in saving the vines. It’s wild out here.

What makes growing and making wine in Colorado so different?

We’re in a high desert and nothing grows here without irrigation. Everything we farm is irrigated from snowmelt via 100-year-old ditches that run off the Rockies. That alone makes this place unique. The wines are super bright, super aromatic and high in acid. They’re not easily compared to Burgundy or Oregon or anywhere else. And that diurnal temperature swing, that difference between hot days and cold nights, helps us retain acid, which will be huge as other regions lose it to climate change.

But it’s not easy. We don’t have access to used winemaking equipment like you might in California. We’re landlocked so shipping anything, glass, barrels, corks, costs more. There’s no shared bottling truck like there is in other states. And worst of all, we can’t even get crop insurance unless we average more than two tons per acre, which we don’t, because we’re farming for quality.

In 2020, we lost everything to a freeze. Zero fruit. No insurance. No meaningful financial support. Our growers are on verbal agreements, and nothing about that structure qualifies for federal recovery programs. Meanwhile, countries like France get hundreds of millions in support to dump wine when they overproduce. Here, you’re lucky if the state responds to your emails.

How would you describe the character of Colorado wine?

High acid, high energy, but also delicate and pretty at the same time. Wines from the desert, these windswept places with intense sun, seem to share this common thread. They’re wines with finesse rather than power, nuanced but layered with complexity. They’re low ABV, rarely pushing past 13%, and they often have this mouthfeel that reminds me of high-mineral spring water.

When they’re first released, they can feel a little tight and out of balance because of the racy acidity, but with a bit of oxygen exposure, they open up and show themselves, usually with these beautiful floral aromas interwoven with the fruit. There’s a freshness, an aliveness, and a sharper focus you just can’t achieve in warmer regions.

The élevage here tends to be longer, too. We need that time for micro-oxidation and secondary fermentation to do their work, to soften the palate and let the tannins and whole-cluster character integrate. One of the biggest differences from other domestic regions is how we’re harvesting: at mid-century brix levels you’d see in Europe, but with far better acid retention. While most of the world is harvesting earlier and earlier to hold on to natural acidity. Year after year, it feels like the fruit is dialing in.

Photography courtesy of Aquila Cellars. © Karen Lane

What challenges are you facing right now?

Access to organic fruit. That’s the biggest bottleneck. We only produce about 1,200 to 1,500 cases a year, because that’s what we can find that’s farmed to our standards. We’re slowly planting more, but that takes capital and we don’t have a ton of that.

And then sales. We’ve built a little following, but we’re not on most people’s radar. Getting people to care about Colorado wine, or even just taste it, is still an uphill battle.

Can you talk about the lack of support for local wine you’ve seen?

It’s tough. There’s no real built-in loyalty to Colorado wine, not even from the people who say they care about local food systems. I’ve worked with sommeliers and retailers here who go on record talking about how excited they are about New York and Texas wines, and I’m like, cool, but I’m literally making natural wine in your backyard.

Even the farm-to-table restaurants here, the ones that are supposed to be aligned with us, don’t want to taste Colorado wine. Their lists are full of Burgundy and Barolo. I get it, those are great wines, but if you’re serving lamb from the ranch next door, maybe at least taste something grown 10 miles away.

We’ve had more wine professionals from Brooklyn come to tour the farm than from Denver but still barely have an out-of-state presence.

Why do you think domestic wine often come at a higher price point?

Honestly? It’s because we have to charge more. There’s no inheritance of land, no century-old infrastructure, no subsidies. In Europe, you can get handed a vineyard or buy used equipment from a neighbor. Here, I have to buy bottling gear outright, source everything from far away and compete with a $22 bottle of French wine that had generations of support baked into it.

We also can’t make massive volumes. If we want to stay small and not scale to 10,000 cases, the price has to reflect that. Otherwise, the math doesn’t work.

What do you think is holding back domestic wine, especially small producers, from gaining broader recognition and support?

I could write a book on this question. Honestly, I think it comes down to xenophilia. At some point, America sold its soul to corporations for ease, convenience and cheap thrills. We became a nation of consumption, not production. Then a new generation was born into a culture with no substance, a culture of dollar stores and dead dreams, where all the mystery and romance had been sucked dry by corporate greed.

Instead of saying “we should change this,” we latched onto our heritage. We traveled to foreign countries, to the old world, and idolized what they’d preserved and we had lost, a culture centered around place, around food, around enjoying life and supporting your neighbors. We blew our hard-earned money on week-long trips to Europe to discover the next great producer, instead of investing in building the future we were actually seeking here at home.

Photography courtesy of Aquila Cellars. © Karen Lane

We told ourselves quality food, quality olive oil, quality wine only come from a few places in the world. That our own terroir isn’t worth exploring. And we keep telling ourselves that today. We’ve lost the inspiration, the pioneer spirit, the belief in boundless possibility. We’ve lost our fascination with our immediate environment, our sense of place. Without that, we’ll never believe in the beauty or the journey of domestic wine.

And if xenophilia is the religion of the wine world, then sommeliers are the priests, sitting at the pearly gates with St. Peter (Robert Parker’s ghost) deciding who gets in.

What’s the vision for Aquila?

The short-term goal is simple: survive. We’ve scaled back production to focus on what we believe are the best expressions of our terroir, working with our own estate and a handful of sites that we think can produce world-class wines. Beyond wine, we’re still growing a quarter-acre of market produce, farming peaches for a brandy collaboration with Family Jones, and harvesting apples for our single-orchard, small-batch apple juice called Something for the Kids. For now, we’re staying small and focused on doing what we do best.