Welcome. Welcome The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is. We venture to Arizona and Callaghan vineyards. In the mid seventies, a soil scientist from the University of Arizona, doctor Gordon Dutt, doing some research for a project that he was working on, was surprised to find that there were no wineries in the state even though the soil composition was similar to Burgundy, France. After some funding, the wine business was born in Elgin and Sonoita area in Arizona. The state of Arizona has over 100 wineries, but particular area we're talking about.

This is, including Kent Callaghan, owner, winemaker, vineyard Guy Callaghan Vineyard so we go.

Back to summertime, 1990. Kent's parents decide to start the vineyards along with Kent's. But Mother Nature didn't exactly greet them with open arms.

Well, we planted in the middle of a heat wave. It was the first time that as far as I know, Sky harbor airport in Phoenix had shut down. I think it was 122 for a couple days up there it was 105 here. So we lost a lot of our planting stock right off the bat. In Cabernet, which was about 9000 of those vines, we lost probably 2500. Yeah, yeah.

All that hard work and then to see those vines die because of the extreme heat, you probably wonder, whose idea was this anyway?

My dad's idea. He had been a home winemaker. So they bought this parcel and then asked me if I wanted to help them plant and start, plant a lanyard and start a winery. I was right out of college at that point basically.

So you graduate from college, where'd you go to college?

Pomona, in Claremont.

Okay. In southern California. And graduated with a degree in philosophy. So from that to the current time you've been doing this, what? Let's see, do my math here. A little over 30 years.

Yeah, 30 years. 30 is vintage this year and then 31st year growing.

How big is pruning to the success of a vineyard?

Oh, it's huge. It's my opinion it's the single most important thing that you do. If you had to rank them, explain.

How, why it's so critical.

Well, it sets the stage for basically everything else. If you prune correctly, you know, you're just setting yourself off for success. Divine architecture. The way the vine grows is going to give you hopefully what you've intended to get with less need for inputs, particularly manual input.

Without getting too philosophical, how would you describe your vineyard, your winery?

We're not looking for huge crops. We're looking for quality fruit. So it's. That's the whole focus of what we do.

Are you one of the bigger wineries.

Biggest acreage, one of the smaller wineries? Our output is not particularly large. We're probably the third large, fourth largest, something like that, out of 15. Yeah, well, that was the whole goal from the start, was never to be a large operation, but a totally quality oriented one.

It's a winery. Of what are you most proud of?

I just. A lot of things, I mean, just enjoy, I guess. We're best known for reds. We're still experimenting. I mean, it's been a. Quite a long journey in trying to figure out what varieties grow best, not only in Sonoita, where we are specifically, but on our specific site. And that is something that's still ongoing. It's been fun and somewhat, you know, time consuming, obviously, but, uh, mostly rewarding. So our best varieties, in my opinion, for this site, and generally in Sonoita too, at this point, graciano, sativardeau, tonat immediately come to mind. And those for whites, we are really starting to lean towards t man thing, which is the white variety that comes from the same area of southwestern France that Thanat comes from. We come, got into the business not knowing anything really about wine, but basically become a wine geek. So that's, to me, the most interesting thing about wine. Learning about, you know, other wines in particular, not just our own, but for the folks that are consumers that enjoy our wines, I think it's interesting for them to see, you know, the library tasting we're going to do to see how the wines age, what's done well, you know, and how the vintage is different, are different because we definitely have vintage variation in Arizona in general, and particularly in Sonoita, due to the monsoon rainfall that we. We get. Everything depends on how much rain falls, when it falls, if we have, you know, cloud cover at critical times when it's, you know, Verizon, that kind of thing. So all of those things affect the. And that obviously affects your wine, not only your quality, but also the character of the vintage.

Okay. Due to time constraints. That concludes part one of our interview with Kent of Callahan vineyards. So that brings us up to our listener voicemail.

Hello, this is Savannah from Corona, California. I would like to know who invented the corkscrew and when.

As best as historians can recall, the earliest reference to a corkscrew was in the 1680s. They called the crude instrument a steel worm. We do know that Reverend Samuel Henshaw received the first patent in 1795. Thank you, Savannah, for your question. Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast was produced by IHYSM. If you like the show, please tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time, pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.