Bodega Pierce

East Robbs Road runs southeast out of Willcox. Fifteen miles along it, the Pierce family keeps a tasting room among its own vines. The vineyard is called Rolling View. It covers 80 acres on the stretch of ground known as the Willcox Bench, at an average elevation of 4,200 feet, with 27 of those acres in production. Every wine poured under the Bodega Pierce name, the winery says, is made from grapes grown on this estate.

The family keeps a second tasting room, and its winery, at Clarkdale in the Verde Valley, ten minutes from Jerome. The fruit is grown here and made into wine there.

Eighteen grapes on the bench

The bench rises away from the valley floor, and the slope drains cold air off the vines on freezing nights. The soils are gravelly and sandy loams that drain well. The vineyard’s page names the main types as Comoro, Tubac, and Sonoita sandy loam. A 2023 article in the Alcohol Professor places the surrounding basin among the Chiricahua and Dos Cabezas Mountains to the east, the Pinaleño Mountains to the northeast, and the Dragoons to the west. Summer temperatures there can drop by as much as 50 degrees overnight. Much of the region’s roughly 14 inches of yearly rain falls in the monsoon of July and August. The basin was approved as the Willcox American Viticultural Area in 2016.

The winery lists eighteen grapes in its rows:

Syrah Petite Sirah Grenache Mourvèdre Viognier Cabernet Sauvignon Cabernet Franc Merlot Sauvignon Blanc Sangiovese Chardonnay Pinot Gris Pinot Noir Tempranillo Malvasia Bianca Muscat of Alexandria Zinfandel Graciano

The state tourism listing, Visit Arizona, gives the count as seventeen. The family’s stated aim is wine that expresses “the high desert terroir of the Willcox Bench.” Its entry with Willcox Wine Country, the consortium of area farm wineries, signs off: “Swirl responsibly the glass is half full.”

Muscat in August

PHOENIX magazine followed one harvest at Rolling View in a photo essay published in 2021. In August 2020, volunteers gathered for an early start, some of them after camping overnight in the vineyard. Dan Pierce collected buckets of Muscat. He and his wife, Barbara, showed the crew how to cut away the ripened clusters. The pickers worked mature vines, six years or older, each of which yields about two bottles of wine on average. By Craig Dziadowicz’s count, the eleven of them brought in a ton of grapes for every half hour of work.

The fruit was for Dziadowicz, owner of Hidden Track Bottle Shop in Phoenix. Five years earlier he had come to the Pierces with an idea for wines named after Phoenix’s historic neighborhoods: an F.Q. Story Chardonnay, a Coronado Petite Sirah, a Roosevelt Rhône blend. He called it the Historic District Series. He told the magazine the idea “literally sat on our counter for a couple of years in the form of a sketch on a piece of paper taped to a wine bottle.” The fourth release, Encanto, was a red blend of Cabernet Franc and Merlot. In June 2020 the Valley artist Ryan Tempest drew its label in pen and ink: an aerial view of the neighborhood with a Mediterranean Revival house and a prickly pear. The Muscat picked that August went toward a 2022 vintage that did not yet have a name.

After picking, the grapes were refrigerated and taken to the Clarkdale winery, where they were destemmed and pressed. Head winemaker Michael Pierce, son of Dan and Barbara, said fermentation takes ten to thirty days, until the wine “is stable and ready to age.” Encanto spent twelve months in oak barrels and six in the bottle. In March 2021 it went through the labeling machine at Clarkdale, with Tempest’s design printed on rolls of stickers, and came to 312 bottles. That August, friends and harvest volunteers toasted its release on the patio of Boho Farms, a 1903 “farmette” in the Roosevelt district. “The perception of wine is so uppity, but it’s just an agricultural product,” said Danielle Middlebrook, Dziadowicz’s partner.

A supertaster and a vineyard for sale

The Alcohol Professor tells the winery’s beginning as a chance discovery. Dan’s home brewing of beer revealed that Michael was a supertaster, and the two decided to take up wine. That article has them studying at UC Davis and Washington State University, then working vineyards in New Zealand, Tasmania, Oregon, and Washington.

A 2015 Farm Progress profile traces Michael’s own route:

He comes from Phoenix and earned a degree in electronic media and visual communication from Northern Arizona University. He studied enology and viticulture at Washington State. He crushed grapes in Oregon, New Zealand, and Tasmania. He managed four vintages at Arizona Stronghold.

Wine Business Monthly, in a piece headed “Family Winery Finds Success and Happiness in Arizona Wine Home,” says Dan found a vineyard for sale in Willcox and the family decided to go for it.

Bodega Pierce dates its operation to 2010. The Rolling View estate was purchased in 2011, and the Alcohol Professor credits Dan with buying the land and putting in the vines. Michael, meanwhile, directed enology at Yavapai College’s Verde Valley campus in Clarkdale. In 2015 he described his teaching to Farm Progress: “I don’t try to push over my preferred stylistic approaches. I try to give the students options.” By then father and son owned two labels, Bodega Pierce and Saeculum Cellars. In 2020 Wine Business Monthly included the winery’s 2018 Chardonnay in its Hot Brands coverage.

The vineyard’s name goes back further. Rolling View Farm was the family’s place in Nebraska. The winery’s vineyard page shows Frank Elliot Pierce at that farm, above the line: “Now, four generations on, the Pierces have continued the agricultural tradition in Southern Arizona.”