Alcantara Vineyards - Arizona Wine Growers Association

Iwas asked to reflect on my experience with the Arizona
wine industry, having started my Arizona winery in May
of 1980. The conclusion I came to was that I was 30 years
too soon.
RW Webb Winery was the first
commercial winery to vint table wine
in Arizona since prohibition. People
told me that I was out of my mind.
“What was I going to do, make wine
out of cactus This is Arizona, not
California.” “You’re just an ex-Navy
pilot and a home winemaker with no
formal training, who do you think
you are”
In 1980, Arizona was the country’s
fifth largest producer of table grapes.
Nobody was growing wine grapes
because there were no wineries to
sell them to. I figured we could grow
wine grapes because the U of A had
a test plot of wine grapes in a water
harvesting project at Oracle Junction,
AZ. Lo and behold, the grapes were of
good quality.
I figured if I built a winery, people
would plant wine grapes. I was
right. It just took 30 years for it to
happen. Our first vintage was made
with Cabernet Sauvignon from Paso
Robles, CA. Due to ATF labeling
regulations, I couldn’t put a vintage or
an appellation other than “American”
on our label. Our first label read
“American Cabernet Sauvignon”.
I subsequently learned that if I
restricted sales to Arizona only,
I could put a vintage on the label.
State law at that time said that an
Arizona winery could only sell wine to a distributor. You could
not sell to anyone else - not to a restaurant, not to a store, not to a
tasting room, only to licensed wine distributors. I hadn’t thought
things through very well.
What if no distributor wanted to buy my wine 1200 cases is a
lot of wine to drink, even with the help of friends. Luckily, All
American Distributors purchased all 1200 cases for $50,000. I
thought I had died and gone to heaven - I was overjoyed. In
1981 we produced 1500 cases of Cabernet from California. I
also purchased twenty tons of Grey Riesling from Don Pedro
Mahue, who had a vineyard in Sonora, Mexico (that’s a whole
8
GRAPE PERSPECTIVES:
30 Years Too Soon
by Robert W. Webb
“
I figured if I built a winery, people would
plant wine grapes . . . I was right, it just took 30
years for it to happen.
”
story in its self). The Riesling was pretty good and All American
Distributors bought it all.
By 1982 there were a handful of crazy people who had planted
grapes. Bill Staltari founded the second
winery - San Dominique and Gordon
Dutt founded the third - Sonoita
Vineyards. It became apparent to us
that we needed to get the law changed
so that we could sell our wine direct,
bypassing the 3-tier system or we
would forever be at the mercy of the
powerful distributors. That is when we
founded the Arizona Wine Growers
Association. Dr. Adrian Bozeman
was our first president. I was on the
original board as was Bill Staltari and
Warren Brown. I can’t remember who
else was on the board, but I wound up
spending 16 years on it.
Photo by Lyn Sims
The liquor distributors are very
powerful in our state and they did
not want to let us change the law and
bypass the 3-tier system. Since we
were growing our own grapes, we
were an Arizona agricultural product.
As such, we allied ourselves with the
Arizona agriculture lobby, which was
a stronger lobbying force than the
liquor lobby. Our rationale was that
as farmers, we should be allowed to
grow our grapes, process them and sell
the product like any other agricultural
commodity. Thus the Arizona
Domestic Farm Winery statute
was passed which regulated
us outside the 3-tier system,
allowing us to have tasting
rooms, selling direct to the
public and sell direct to anyone
who had a valid liquor license. It also gave us the ability to hold
“off premises” tastings. This is something that really helped create
awareness of Arizona wines and RW Webb Winery in particular.
I learned that to be successful as an Arizona winery you had to
do more than make good wine. You had to make good wine out
of Arizona fruit and market, market, market the wine. By the
time I sold the winery in 1997, I had RW Webb wines in every
supermarket chain in the state.
I started looking for land for my vineyard in 1981. It had to have
a good water supply, high elevation for cool nights, no Texas root
rot and be affordable. I found what I thought was the perfect site
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