Why Don’t Denver Restaurants Serve more Colorado Wine? (Westword)
Antony Bruno
September 15, 2026
Denver’s farm-to-table ethos, it seems, largely stops at the wine list
We’re in that time of year when Colorado restaurants celebrate some of the state’s most iconic crops. Olathe sweet corn. Palisade peaches. Rocky Ford cantaloupe. Pueblo green chile.
But Colorado wine? Not so much.
Finding Colorado-produced wine at Denver restaurants is a far greater rarity, and the state’s wine industry has had enough.
“We make some high-quality wines here,” says Kyle Schlachter, executive director of the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board, a division of the Colorado Department of Agriculture charged with promoting and supporting the state wine business. “They are comparable in quality to other regions, to California brands, and I think we need to get people to embrace and support our local industries.”
But achieving that has proven a greater challenge than expected. For example, the group in April hosted a special tasting event at the Hotel Teatro downtown featuring representatives from dozens of Colorado winemakers.
Over 200 distributors, restaurateurs, and wine buyers were invited. About 20 showed up. Denver’s farm-to-table ethos, it seems, largely stops at the wine list.
“Colorado restaurants, bars, and just the general public have always embraced Colorado beer and craft spirits more than they have Colorado wine, even though none of the ingredients for that beer or that spirit, for the most part, are grown in Colorado,” says Ben Parsons, owner and winemaker at The Ordinary Fellow Winery in Palisade. “Whereas Colorado wine, for the most part, is made from Colorado grapes. It’s more Colorado than Colorado beer and Colorado liquor, yet it hasn’t ever gotten the same pickup as both those other forms.”
Is Colorado wine any good?
One of the reasons for this is that Colorado wine continues to struggle with the perception that it isn’t very good. And to be fair, for many years, it wasn’t. The Colorado wine industry was started largely by hobbyists who, frankly, didn’t really know what they were doing. As a result, they produced overly sweet wines that lacked any complexity or depth, an assumption that continues to this day.
“Originally, when we were tasting a lot of Colorado wines, they just weren’t good,” says one chef and restaurant owner of a local farm-to-table restaurant who asked for their name to be withheld. “I did a wine tasting in Paonia like 15-20 years ago, and it was fucking disgusting.”
But times have changed. Winemakers from all over the world have moved to Colorado’s major grape-growing centers like Palisade, Paonia, and Hotchkiss, bringing with them the expertise needed to start producing some quality wines.
Famed wine critic James Suckling samples wines from the region earlier this year, reviewing 53 wines from 15 Colorado wineries and found 36 of them deserving of 90-point ratings or higher, considered “excellent.”
But much of this turnaround has only taken place in the last five years. And while the perception has started to soften in certain wine circles, there remains decades of mistrust to overcome.
“We still struggle with consumers knowing that we even produce wines in Colorado, and if they do know, that it’s not all sweet fruit wines,” Schlachter says. “There’s a stigma that still persists about wines in Colorado that they’re not necessarily the quality or the style that consumers want, which I think is not accurate, but that’s kind of the perception that’s out there.”
That’s a big challenge for risk-averse restaurants not willing to stick their necks out to champion wine that diners might not want to buy.
“What I don’t like is when I go to a new restaurant and the buyer is anti-Colorado wine and not even willing to do his job and taste it,” says Parsons.
The price predicament
Perception is not the only hurdle. Another is cost. The Colorado wine industry is tiny, without the economies of scale that larger regions enjoy, Colorado-made wine is naturally going to be more expensive.
“It’s almost impossible to make a bottle of wine for less than 15 bucks,” says Parsons. “That’s just the cost to make it. Then you sell it to a distributor. That distributor sells it to a restaurant. That restaurant sells it to a customer. It’s suddenly not a price point that is favorable.”
Larger wine producers sell their wine to restaurants at cost or even below cost for the marketing benefits that it provides, making up the cost when diners later buy a bottle of the same wine at a store. Colorado wineries don’t produce enough wine to make that possible.
“Many of our wineries are sold just out of their tasting rooms and don’t have distribution with the traditional wholesale tier,” says Schlachter. “And even the ones that want to get into restaurants, it’s difficult. These are mom-and-pop operations, small teams, family operations that don’t have the time and money to devote to servicing restaurants.”
Restaurants leading the charge
As a result, the restaurants making the effort to feature Colorado wines are doing so more out of a sense of responsibility than of profit.
“To me it’s not so much charity as it is an investment, and I think it’s very compelling to be on the front edge of that,” says Caroline Clark, director of beverage and hospitality for the Id Est Hospitality Group. “We’re saying this is the best expression of what’s happening in Colorado right now, and we’re going to stake our reputation on it, so you can trust that we’ve done the work to make sure that this is something we can really stand behind.”
Id Est restaurants — like the two-Michelin-starred Wolf’s Tailor, Basta in Boulder, and the short-term pop-up Sheep — all feature Colorado wines as part of the group’s ethos of leveraging local ingredients of all types. It’s been an early supporter of the local wine scene, starting with Basta, which featured wines from Bookcliff Vineyards in Palisade poured from kegs by the carafe years ago. But not all restaurants can afford to take that stand.
“A big issue in wine culture, and especially for sommeliers, is this pressure to have the most depth and breadth of everything in the wine world at once,” Clark says. “It can be very overwhelming. We need to focus on what’s the highest quality, what’s the most famous, what’s the most historic, the prestige… it creates the situation where you’re not as motivated to study up-and-coming regions or experimental regions in the same way.”