Drought worries tormenting Hotchkiss vineyard owners (The Daily Sentinel)
Dale Shrull
June 20, 2026
“In a perfect world, we would have had our vines planted, maybe three weeks ago. So now we're planting vines in a drought year when our water is forecasted to be shut off, maybe two-plus months early.”
The Storm Cellar is hoping to weather another storm this summer.
After the vineyard survived the spring heat and one wicked night of freezing temperatures, the work is now focused on making sure an additional 8 acres of vines will make it through the summer.
Jayme Henderson and her husband Steve Steese have owned the vineyard and winery, located on the eastern edge of Hotchkiss, since 2017.
In 2023, The Storm Cellar was named the Colorado Association for Viticulture & Enology winery of the year.
Not having access to a crystal ball, as Henderson puts it, they made the decision to by the new vines a year-and-a-half ago.
That’s when they decided to add to their 23 farmable acres by adding an additional 8 acres — 4 acres of Chardonnay and another 4 acres of Pinot Noir grapes.
“Hands down, we’re very concerned. Very concerned,” Henderson said last week about the ongoing drought.
Part of the reason they ordered the nearly 2,800 vines and are now planting them was because of another organic farming challenge from Mother Nature.
“We lost some vines in 2023 due to a mad outbreak of grasshoppers that caught us by surprise. That also was further compounded by a frost event that same year,” she said.
Now that mountain of concern shifts to the drought.
That decision and planting the new vineyard has created a massive amount of work at The Storm Cellar.
“In a perfect world, we would have had our vines planted, maybe three weeks ago. So now we’re planting vines in a drought year when our water is forecasted to be shut off, maybe two-plus months early,” Henderson said.
They had to commit to the vine project a year and a half in advance, long before the dire news of this summer’s drought situation.
“And last week it spiked up to nearly 100 degrees and we’re planting those vines. We have water right now, which is great, but making sure that those vines get really good water to encourage redevelopment, that’s the challenge,” she said.
"What Ever it Takes"
The plan is simple.
“The strategy is we’re gonna do whatever it takes,” Henderson said.
With the new vines so dependent on needing major irrigation for survival, Henderson knows they need to have an irrigation strategy, especially later in the summer.
“We have large tanks that we can just hand water throughout the vineyard. The established vines, they can be watered, maybe once a week or just small amounts, and they’ll be fine because they’re five-plus years old. It’s those new ones that we are concerned about.
“One thing that we do have as an advantage, but it’s a slight advantage. We have a backup spring (on the property), and it fluctuates based on that it comes from a different reservoir than our main irrigation source,” she explained.
When word came out that the freeze this spring took the entire crop from the North Fork fruit farmers, she said they were devastated by the news.
“Those are our friends, our colleagues. We depend on them as they do us to bring money into this valley, to bring visitors into this valley,” she said.
Virtually everyone was impacted in the tightly-knit communities of Hotchkiss, Paonia and the entire valley.
“A friend of mine, a couple who run Excelsior Orchards, they are just about 10 minutes west of us. They have zero fruit this year,” Henderson said. “They have a little bit of table grapes, they’re gonna be able to sell. They are doing a farm stand, and so we’re looking at ways to see how can we sell our wine there so that we’re able to point people to stop by, get some things from their farm stand, pick up a bottle of wine as well.