Colorado wine country in prestigious newspaper -- including some factual slippage
In a New York Times travel feature called "Biking Colorado's Wine Country," New York-based wine writer Stefani Jackenthal explores the Palisade region on two wheels. She and a friend spent three days cycling, sipping, dining and B&Bing. I love it when the the prestigious Times focuses attention on Colorado, but why, oh, why does the self-proclaimed "newspaper of record" always get something wrong? The last time was the misleading "36 Hours in Denver" feature with so many off-the-mark facts and suggestions that I blogged it and, more importantly, the Times' mailbox was loaded with objections and corrections from indignant Coloradans.
The wine country piece, which will appear in Sunday's Travel Section but is already available online and in Friday papers, is also somewhat off the mark. Jackenthal wrote, "The first contemporary Colorado winery opened in 1968, but it was slow growing; by 1990, there were only four wineries. Eventually, however, the industry took root. Today there are 72 recognized Colorado wineries, according to the Colorado Wines trade group, with more on the way." Ivancie Winery indeed opened 1968 using non-Colorado grapes but was fairly short-lived. Wineries and vineyards hiccuped into being, and it was two decades before Colorado wineries really were producing wines from Colorado grapes. The trade group is called the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board, more of a mouthful than Colorado Wines but it's the correct name.
The town of Palisade is described as being "surrounded by the Book Cliffs mountain range and Grand Mesa." Palisade isn't surrounded by those two geological features. The Grand Mesa is to the southeast. The Book Cliffs are on the other side of the Colorado River to the north. That leaves the south and west, which are drier than the Mesa and flatter than both. The Book Cliffs are not a mountain range but rather a 60-mile-long escarpment of exposed, eroded sedimentary rock. Wikipedia currently calls them a "mountain range," which is probably where she found the inaccurate description.
Halka Chronic's geologically definitive Roadside Geology of Colorado desribes the Book Cliffs as "towering palisades of Mancos shale. This gray shale, yellow where it is leached, contains types of clay that swell when wet and shrink when dry. Such action brings about a loose soil that is so constantly eroding that it won't support much in the way of vegetation. Where it is not protected by the Mesaverde caprock, the Mancos shale erodes into hump-backed gray and yellow badlands."
But then again, Jackenthal visited several Colorado wineries, compared their wines to European ones and generally enthused about what she found. So who am I to worry that she's weak on Colorado geology and that she implies a non-existent continuum between Ivancie's winery, the real start of the modern Colorado wine industry two decades later and its increasing maturation 20 years after that.
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