Avant Vineyards

The tasting room on E Road

The tasting room at Avant Vineyards, 3480 E Road, is a small one. It looks out over the Colorado River, Mt. Garfield, and the wildlife refuge on the low ground below. Outside, a picnic and bocce area has the same view. The winery advises visitors to bring a picnic. The Colorado West Land Trust’s directory lists wine by the glass or bottle, cheese and the like to eat with it, lavender products from SageCreations, and peaches in season. The state tourism listing notes a gift shop and parking on the grounds, and puts the largest group the room takes at fifteen. The farm is one of those conserved with the land trust.

Diane Guard, listed by the land trust as Diane Brown-Guard, makes the wine. Neil Guard manages the vineyard. Their grapes grow on the place, along the river at the base of the Grand Mesa, in what the winery calls a high-desert climate of cool nights and hot days. The wine is made in small batches, and the winery says it keeps the process as natural as it can so the character of the fruit comes through.

The list on the winery’s site runs to four kinds:

• Whites: Albarino, a Viognier and Roussanne blend called Montage, Sauvignon Blanc, and a Grenache Blanc marked “First vintage!”
• Rosés: one of Syrah and one of Cabernet Franc.
• Reds: Sangiovese, Tempranillo, Malbec, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, a Cabernet Sauvignon and Sangiovese blend, a limited-edition Cabernet Sauvignon, and Teroldego, flagged as a new release.
• Sparkling: a Blanc de Noir made by the méthode champenoise, shown as sold out, and a Proprietor’s Reserve Red Pétillant Naturel from a Bordeaux blend.

The site also announces Rosso di Montagna Unica, a Teroldego and Sangiovese blend.

At the 2025 Governor’s Cup, three of the wines took silver: the 2024 Albarino, the 2024 Grenache Blanc, and the 2023 Sangiovese. Ten years before that, at the 2015 Mesa County Fair commercial competition, the 2012 Malbec won silver and the 2013 Cabernet Franc and 2013 Petit Verdot won bronze. That contest was judged blind, and every entry had to be at least 75 percent Mesa County fruit.

In September, during Winefest and Colorado Wine Week, the room opens every day of the week. The site has posted a Friday evening concert by Stray Grass with the Underdog Cheese food truck parked alongside. It has also posted a Sunday afternoon set by Lucky Find with the 505 Fix truck, with a tenth of bottle sales going to the Good Samaritan Free Clinic.

Three thousand peach trees

The farm came before the vines. The Guards came to the Grand Valley in the mid-1990s; by 2010 they had been there fourteen years, according to a Daily Sentinel profile by Dave Buchanan that March. Diane had finished her medical residency in Denver and taken a job in the emergency department at St. Mary’s Hospital. Neil had worked as an embryologist in Boulder and found that such positions were scarce on the Western Slope.

While he weighed what to do, he spent days with a longtime friend, Tom Cameron, watching Cameron prune his orchard of plums, cherries, and peaches. “You have to be careful when you prune and he wouldn’t let me touch his trees until he felt comfortable I understood his pattern,” Neil said.

The Guards sold their Boulder house and bought land on East Orchard Mesa. Neil planted 3,000 peach trees on six acres and named the place Avant Farm. He credited the neighboring fruit grower Bruce Talbott with timely advice. He also named Cameron, Bryan Nolan, and the Colorado State University research center as supporters.

“You think people are going to throw money at you for your peaches,” Neil told the Sentinel, laughing at it by then. “We soon found out it’s not that way, but by then we were too far into this to back out.” Diane’s hospital work carried the household while the farm found its footing. “Without Diane’s contribution, this wouldn’t be happening,” he said.

Grapes for other people’s wine

For several years the Guards grew wine grapes to sell. Their fruit went to wineries around the state, among them Balestreri Vineyards in Denver, which won awards with wine made from Avant Farm grapes. In 2010 they said they grew nine varieties on nine acres. When Neil listed them, the count ran past nine:

• cabernet sauvignon
• cabernet franc
• riesling
• sauvignon blanc
• sangiovese
• viognier
• malbec
• tempranillo
• roussanne
• white vernaccia
• petit verdot

They also made private batches to give away or pour for guests. “People kept asking us, ‘When are you going to start selling your wine?’” Diane said. “But we couldn’t do that without a winery license.” In 2010 they set out to get one, and both used the same phrase for it: vertically integrated. Diane, then still working 10- to 12-hour emergency room shifts, said she found winemaking a stress reliever.

They meant from the start to make blends. A buyer might want a small lot of one or two grapes, but bottling small single batches cost too much. “That’s the whole point,” Neil said. “We want blends. It’s hard to grow perfect grapes every year, which means there are going to be gaps in the flavor profile.”

On a research trip to Argentina, Diane tasted three malbecs from different elevations at one winery. “They also let you make your own blend from the malbecs and that was really fun,” she said. “You truly could make different wines, it was all terroir.” She called herself “more of the European style of winemaker.” She credited advice from local winemakers Jenne Baldwin-Eaton, Parker Carlson, and Steve and Naomi Smith, and from C.A.V.E., the valley’s association of winemakers and growers.

The early wines went unfiltered. “It’s unfiltered because we can’t afford a filter yet,” Neil said with another laugh. “But in the old days nobody filtered because they didn’t have filters, either.” Their travels took them to wine country in California, Washington, Oregon, Italy, Chile, and Spain, where tempranillo grows in country Neil thought looked like home. “If you put an old castle on top of Mount Garfield, it would look just like the Duero Valley,” he said.

Minus twelve, and the river in boots

The winery began in a hard season. Record cold in December 2009 may have cost many Grand Valley growers their 2010 crop. “We’re sort of on the edge of where you can grow grapes, anyway,” Neil said that March, “and the last four years have been one hammering after another.” Then he added: “That’s what farming is, only who knew it would be minus 12?”

Diane described how unsure the spring pruning would be. Growers normally left two buds on a cane, but some were talking of leaving up to ten “just because we don’t know what survived.”

In 2014 it happened again. That December the cold split vines that still had juice in them, and a late spring frost followed. In August, Neil walked his rows for the Sentinel. “I have eight rows of riesling, five of petit verdot and 14 of cabernet franc, but they’re shorter than the other rows,” he said. “So, that makes about two acres of grapes out of nine. What’s that, about 20 percent? All the rest, there aren’t any grapes. Peaches are going to carry the farm this year.” He had netted the cabernet franc against birds and might side-net the riesling, but would leave the rest bare. “Why net something you don’t have?”

The vines drink from the Colorado River. In Wine Enthusiast’s February/March 2023 issue, Neil said the 1922 allocation of the river had over-allocated it: “[You] can’t really give away more than you have.” He also described how low the water had run: “This year, I can walk across the Colorado River in my irrigation boots. That shouldn’t happen.”