Alfred Eames Cellars at Puesta del Sol Vineyards

On the flank of Mount Lamborn, about three miles south of Paonia, the barrels of Alfred Eames Cellars rest in a room set into the ground below the vines of Puesta del Sol. The ceilings are arched in the Spanish manner and the walls are cement-lined. By the ZenZen Gardens account, the barrels are French and Hungarian oak. Alfred Eames designed the cave, drawing on a trip to Spain, and built it with his son. “We built this to be like a cave, with thick walls and buried in the ground, to maintain a near-constant temperature,” Devin Petersen told a guest at the 2014 holiday barrel tasting. “It fluctuates less than 10 degrees though the year.”

The family’s own site calls the place a working winery, farm and home. It says the winery can be visited only during scheduled events or, occasionally, by appointment. Tours and the reserve tastings in the cellar require a reservation. The Valley Organic Growers Association listing gives a looser rule: call for an appointment during the week, with open house most weekends in season.

The tasting room at ZenZen Gardens

For everyday tasting the winery sends visitors to ZenZen Gardens, a farm about four miles away that serves as its official tasting room. ZenZen’s owner, Cindie, pours the wines in a garden setting daily from noon to 6 p.m. between May 1 and November 1. Walk-ins are welcome, and children are offered non-alcoholic drinks and snacks.

The list includes Pinot Noir, estate-bottled Syrah, and Tempranillo. There is a Bordeaux blend called Collage, a proprietary red blend called Sangre del Sol, and Carmena. Noche is a dessert wine, and SBV is a white blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier. ZenZen’s page counts six varietal wines and four blends and announced a Petite Syrah for release in 2025.

Pinot Noir is the only grape grown on the home vineyard. The other wines are made from Colorado grapes bought in. The fruit is picked by hand at dawn and fermented in open masonry vats, and the wine goes to bottle unfined and unfiltered. The winery’s site gives 16 to 20 months in French oak; ZenZen’s page says a minimum of one year.

A Xinhua report in 2019 put production at 2,000 cases a year. That year Eames was paying an extra $800 in tariffs on an order of glass bottles from China. He said American-made bottles cost twice as much and were of poorer quality.

The labels are the work of Wilkie Studio, whom ZenZen calls Eames’s good friend. The first was the Tempranillo label, which Wilkie presented to Eames as a gift. He fell for it because the figure resembled a beautiful Spanish woman he remembered, and the later labels were based on that first piece. According to ZenZen, the names Tempranillo, Sangre del Sol, Noche and Vino Tinto all come from the Spanish wineries Eames visited as a young man.

Rioja at seventeen, a peach in Paonia

Alfred Eames Petersen, who makes wine under his first two names, went to Spain’s Rioja region in 1964, at 17. ZenZen’s account has him spending nine months there learning to choose grapes, ferment and bottle. He was then conscripted into the U.S. military, which, the winery’s history says, changed his course for many years. Wherever he was posted, he kept making wine.

In the mid-1980s he passed through Paonia at the right time to eat a fresh peach from a local farm. “Absolutely amazing!!” the winery’s account says. From then on he was hooked, and he came to believe the West Elk Mountains could produce wines to rival the world’s most celebrated regions.

The record of what came next does not agree with itself:

• ZenZen Gardens says the vineyard was planted with Pinot Noir in 1990 and named Puesta del Sol, Spanish for “sunset.” It says Eames first offered his wines to the public in 1994.
• The Valley Organic Growers Association has the vineyard planted in 1992 and the winery opening in 1998.
• Dave Buchanan, writing in The Daily Sentinel in 2018, says Eames and his wife, Pam Petersen, planted Puesta del Sol in 1995. He dates the first commercial vintage to 1998, three years before the West Elks American Viticultural Area was formed.
• The state’s Colorado Wine directory gives 2000 as the year of establishment.

The winery and ZenZen both call it one of the first vineyards in the North Fork Valley.

The vines stand at 6,000 feet. The winery counts them among the highest in North America and credits more than 300 days of sun a year and mineral-rich alluvial and volcanic soils. “The weather is a problem,” Eames told the Vail Daily in 2016, “but it also actually helps. It gives the fruit great character. You can lose some fruit to spring frost, but generally speaking, the cool nights in fall tend to bring out the sugars and increase the character of the fruit. California has more dependable growth. We have greater character.” He described his own pace in the same interview: “I don’t live in the fast lane, I’m not interested in hurrying up to get on schedule — I think that’s totally contrary to making a good wine. You’ve got to be a little laid back to make wine.”

Carmine and Sangre del Sol

In 2010 Alfred Eames won Colorado’s first wine competition, then called the First Lady’s Choice. Two wines shared Best in Show that year. Sangre del Sol took best red, and Boulder Creek Winery’s Riesling took best white. The Colorado Wine directory records the honor as the 2010 Governor’s Cup Best of Show, for the 2009 Sangre del Sol.

On November 3, 2023, the 2019 Carmena was named Best in Show at Colorado Uncorked, held at the History Colorado Center in Denver. A panel of 15 judges chose it over the other 11 wines of the Governor’s Cup Collection. Those 12 had been drawn from 286 submissions by 48 producers.

Carmena is made from Carmine, a grape Dr. Harold Olmo developed at the University of California, Davis, in 1946. He crossed Cabernet Sauvignon with Carignane and then crossed the result with Merlot. The West Elks AVA reported Carmena as the only commercially available Carmine wine in Colorado.

The Colorado Wine Journal named Eames its 2023 Winemaker of the Year. ZenZen lists 2024 Governor’s Cup Double Golds for Sangre del Sol and Collage and a Gold for Noche.

Barrels, choirs and a second generation

A few times a year the cellar opens to everyone. In the summer of 2026 the winery served two five-course dinners beside its pond, each beginning with a cellar tour:

• July 11: cooked by chef K.J. Kinser.
• July 31: cooked by chef Anthony Reichenbach, opening the West Elk Wine Trails weekend. During that weekend the winery stood open to the public with music by Pam and Eames and food from Sweet Vine Treats.

The yearly holiday barrel tasting is set for December 5, 2026:

• Sweet Vine Treats hors d’oeuvres all day.
• Pam and Eames Petersen playing.
• The Madrigal Choir singing at 1 and 3 p.m., each performance followed by a barrel tasting of very young wine and of wine more than a year in oak.
• Pam’s Jammin selling jams, jellies, holiday baskets and barista coffee.

Buchanan wrote up the 2018 edition, held December 1 and 2. Several hundred people filled the cave, the Madrigal Singers drew standing-room-only crowds, and Pam Petersen’s appetizers took four days to make. The cellar stays closed most days, the son explained, because “it’s just me and Dad.” Buchanan’s column spells him Devon; the winery and ZenZen spell him Devin.

Devin has grown up in the vineyards since he was ten. The winery’s site says he came home after years of travel and exploration. ZenZen says he now runs the day-to-day work hand in hand with his father. His sister, Lais, has a life outside the winery, and Buchanan wrote that she adds to the work to a lesser degree.

At the 2014 barrel tasting, Eames had two new knees, the second installed less than a month before. He was already planning the trek to the lakes on the upper shelf of 12,725-foot Mount Gunnison. “Last time I went, I made it about halfway and had to stop,” he said. “Devin kept going but I had to come back down.”

Devin, then 30, was carrying three cases of wine at once to a guest’s car. “He added 10 years to my life,” Eames said. “He knows everything I do, probably more.” Devin said he would like to grow the business but was limited by the cave’s walls and by the supply of fruit, and that getting bigger could cost them some “intimacy.” “I’m excited about being here,” he said. “This is my home, now.”

Eames had settled on his own part in the work. “I just shuffle around and do quality control,” he said, laughing. “Now, I have time to sit down with my guitar and watch Devin.”