College Times

Issue date: 7/29/10 Section: News

Media Credit: Ryan Ruiz Eric Glomski, 42, owns Page Springs Cellars, a vineyard and winery just south of Sedona, Arizona, in Cornville.

Eric Glomski blends well with his northern Arizona environment. The 42-year-old has a laid back attitude about most things - not to be confused with a lack of passion, however. He's got a family (complete with four kids), along with his own views on SB 1070 (for the record, he completely opposes it) and an all-around pleasant demeanor.

And who wouldn't with the job he's got? Glomski is the owner/operator of Page Springs Cellars, a vineyard and winery just south of Sedona, in Cornville. He's the master wine maker there, although he's hands-on with every aspect of the business. With 21 years of grape growing/wine making experience under his belt, he's got rock star colleagues (true story, Maynard James Keenan, the lead singer of the band Tool, is his partner at yet another vineyard, Arizona Stronghold), and wines being sold in 30 states.

What's more, he's experienced continued success since Page Springs Cellars opened in 2007. Arizona Stronghold and Keenan's own label Caduceus, both of which get their grapes from Page Springs Cellars, garnered top spots in both red and white wine in the Judgment of Arizona, an annual blind tasting of top wines from around the world, put on by FnB Restaurant in Scottsdale.

So it only makes sense that Glomski opens the doors to his vineyard to a special select few to learn the ropes of Arizona grape growing and wine making in his informal yet rigorous apprenticeship program.

Without a name or any real routine, per se, the program aims to fully illustrate what it takes to go from growing the vines, tending, pruning and harvesting them, to then making the wine, which includes science and knowledge that can really only be learned on-the-job. Then, once the wine is finished, the protégés are encouraged to create their own label, and start bottling and selling the stuff.

In the Beginning

Corey Turnbull had been living the daily grind at restaurant after restaurant for nine years before deciding he had enough.

"I had known Eric for a while before I even started working here, and one day I decided I'd come out here, and help in whatever way I could," he says. "One morning I went with Eric to Lockwood Oaks [Vineyard], which is up in California. I woke up early in the morning, about 5 a.m., and we drove up to the vineyard in a big truck. I got there, and watched the sunrise over the vineyard. I'm sitting on top of the truck with grapes from the vineyard in one hand and a Red Bull in the other, and just seeing the prettiness of it, it was then that I realized this is something I want to do."

From there, Turnbull worked as a self-proclaimed "cellar rat" for about a year. This title sums up the job pretty nicely: cleaning out barrels, making sure the cellar is at the right temperature, and then also working around the vines, performing general maintenance.

But it wasn't long before Turnbull, 30, got the bug to start making his own wine, and Glomski didn't even think twice before giving him the green light.

"Most wineries you work at, they don't let you make your own wine, they make you focus on their product, and they don't like the idea of you creating your own business out of their existing business," Glomski says. "I think here is a way for these guys to immediately jump to being wine makers, and have all of the excitement and none of the limits whatsoever, in a relatively controlled situation where they're not taking responsibility for a huge winery when they've really never even made wine before."

Glomski has this attitude about wine making, in part, because he knows what it's like to want to make wine so bad. He says when he first opened Page Springs Cellars, he was so eager to start making wine, he trucked in grapes from California.

"We didn't want to wait, we just wanted to make wine," he says. "And it costs a lot of money to do this and you need to generate cash flow somehow, so we did that by bringing grapes in."

Luckily, John Scarborough didn't have to wait. He came to work for Glomski in the same fashion as Turnbull. Scarborough did his time as a cellar rat, and slowly worked his way up to creating his own wine, complete with his own unique label.

"I started in the restaurant industry, managing, being the wine guy, everything, and I had worked in some other local vineyards around here for some of the other people," he says. "One day I just got an opportunity to come out here and work in the cellar, and then start making wine, and it was very liberating. It was the coolest thing ever. Eric had really created a little refuge for the downtrodden in the restaurant industry."

After one particular harvest, Glomski had extra fruit and offered it to Scarborough, 34, so that he could start his own wine in-the-making.

"When we got the fruit, there were about 20 tarantula hawks buzzing all around it," he says. "So I put them on my label. It was weird because when I first moved to Arizona, I was in sixth grade, and my first reaction was 'Oh my god, where the hell did my parents move me to?' And the first thing I saw was one of those giant tarantula hawks dragging a tarantula across my backyard, and I just thought, 'Oh my god there's dinosaurs here!'"

It's stories like these that really solidify Glomski's team-centered attitude about making wine, and his willingness to allow newcomers a virtually limitless platform to experiment.

"Our biggest selling point when we're out in the market is that this [wine] is from Arizona, because it's about contrast," he says. "This is something that is new, and unique and special. There's such a glut of California wines on the market now, and once they taste it … what people really want is a story."

Found Fruit

Glomski's start in the industry was a bit different than his protégés'. He went to Prescott College, got his undergraduate degree in riparian ecology, which mixes studies of geology, hydrology and biology, and started his own business. He'd work along rivers, doing restoration work.

"I always came across old homesteads," he says. "A lot of the waterways in central Arizona are on top of lands, so people would settle there, but they wouldn't privatize it through the old Homestead Act. So they'd abandon it, and there'd be all these old apples, pears, sometimes peaches and apricots all around the homes.

"I was already brewing beer … I saw all these old heirloom apples that, you've never seen apples like this before in your life, so I started throwing them in my backpack when I was hiking out, and I started making apple wines."

Once he learned the ropes of making apple wine from old friend Dick Landis, he decided he wanted to transition into making grape wines. He studied under some big names in California (David Bruce being one of them), all the time with the intention that he'd come back here one day and do it on his own.

"One day I had this epiphanous experience, where I was sniffing this apple wine, and I can remember exactly where I picked these apples from," he says. "It was like a transportation there instantly, and that was the point in my life where I realized that wines are these artistic expressions of landscapes. Photographers take photos of landscapes, painters paint landscapes … Well, wine makers express landscapes through liquid, and that's pretty much what I've been doing since then."

And thanks, in part, to Glomski, Arizona has garnered more recognition in the wine industry over the past few years than ever before.

Right now most of the wineries in the state are small, boutique wineries, and most of them aren't selling outside of Arizona, according to Rhonni Moffitt, the executive director of the Arizona Wine Growers Association.

However, Arizona Stronghold, the winery Glomski shares with Tool singer Maynard James Keenan, is sold in 30 states, which is something Moffitt says can only mean good things for the future of the Arizona wine industry.

"At this point, we're getting to be well-known for the quality, which is really nice. The problem right now is we just need more vineyards now than are planted," she says. "We actually have a higher demand for the wine right now along with the grapes being produced. Then the next step from there would be getting some larger more commercial wineries making wine in Arizona that are going national."

But, one thing that trips a lot of people up, she says, is that they don't think grapes grow in Arizona. The truth is quite the contrary.

"Arizona has been growing grapes since the 1700s or something," she says. "The wine grapes like hot days and cool nights, so that's why they do really well in the high desert. The number of licensed and bonded wineries we have in Arizona is 45. Some of those wineries have vineyards, some don't, some vineyards don't have wineries. We've got just under 700 acres of vines that are planted right now. So, the grapes must like the weather enough to keep growing, right?"

Generational Shift

Glomski, Turnbull and Scarborough all think the success of Arizona wines is simple: The makers really care about what they're doing.

"Have you ever seen 'The Doors' movie?" Glomski says. "They practice once on the beach and the next thing you know they're at the Whiskey A Go-Go [in Los Angeles]. I remember reading [guitarist's] Robby Krieger statement about that movie and he said he really enjoyed parts of the movie, but he said the movie really made it seem like it was instant. It's the same thing with us. I mean, just until last year, our bottom vineyards were dying every year, from the cold. This is the first year where it's green, and this year we lit fires in the vineyards to keep the grapes from freezing. In a nut shell, it wasn't over night, I was aggressive."

Turnbull also believes that there's a cultural and generational shift going on among younger people, who are gaining more interest in wine, and the industry.

"We have a more sophisticated palate," he says. "We're not drinking Bud Light, we're trying to find all these really cool breweries. Wine's becoming not so much a drink for elite people but for everybody now."

For Glomski, it's also about the return to craft brews and artisan-style products.

"Now, I'm seeing more wineries, I'm seeing more bakeries, more wine bars," he says. "I always say I'll know our country has recovered when we see butchers again."

Colleen Chase, along with her sister Tina Gibson and her husband Greg, recognized this new appreciation for wine within the state back in 2007, too.

They were driving back from a trip to Vegas to see a Tool concert when they started throwing out ideas about getting involved in the wine industry.

As two self-proclaimed "winos," they wanted to do something involving regular visits to the wineries and vineyards, but they also needed to keep their day jobs.

So, they started Arizona Grape Escapes, a weekend wine touring business that makes visits out to the wineries in both the northern and southern portions of the state. Each tour has a bus, locally catered lunches and tastings of the wines.

Chase says when they started, their clients were mostly older tourists coming to town looking for something fun to do. Since then, they've seen an increase in both the younger crowd, and the locals.

As to a reason why they chose wine to invest in, Gibson says it comes down to the passion they have.

"It's an industry in Arizona that's really just starting to grow, so it's something where we're able to get in on the ground floor, and we can actually watch it grow and grow with it," she says.

Ultimately, Glomski says appreciation for Arizona wine comes from its simplicity.

"It's kind of like appreciating somebody for their innate beauty," he says. "Let's say you have a relationship with someone, and you say 'I like you but I really want you to look this way, so can you lose weight, and shave down the bone in your nose?' If you can't appreciate somebody for their own innate beauty … that's basically what we do here only with the fruit.

"Arizona wines are made well, the may not look like porn stars or Chippendale's dancers, but I think they're more beautiful and much more natural, in a down to earth kind of way."

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools