Carboy Winery at Mt. Garfield Estate

The tasting room at 3572 G Road stands three stories high at the edge of an estate vineyard, 4,742 feet above sea level in Colorado’s Grand Valley AVA. The ground floor holds a standing tasting bar and retail space. The second level has seats for longer tastings. A rooftop patio looks north over the vines toward the Book Cliffs, with Mount Garfield in view. The wine runs from taps fed by stainless steel brite tanks, which the company calls “a sustainability practice that’s become a defining attribute of their business.” Tastings are walk-in only, and the standard pour is a flight of five wines. The company’s own page invites riders to come in after a ride “in true Après Bike style.” There is a food menu, and on opening day in 2022 charcuterie boards went out to the tables.

Saturdays on G Road

The fall 2026 calendar starts on Saturday mornings with Vin.Yasa Saturdays, yoga with wine from 11:00 to 12:30. Saturday afternoons in October bring Backyard Beats, live music from 4:00 to 7:00. Other dates fill in around these. A crochet circle meets on October 11. A fall-and-winter clothing swap runs on October 16. A writing session called The Pen & The Glass and a Paint & Sip share October 23. A cork-crafting workshop falls on October 30, and a holiday craft fair on November 29. The company describes the patio as a place to “watch a concert from the elevated balcony rooftop patio overlooking the vineyard.”

From Thursday through Sunday, a wine specialist leads a vineyard tour through the winery, the vines, and the production building. A longer winemaker tour runs an hour and a half to two hours. It ends among the sparkling tanks, with wine tasted straight from the fermentation tank when there is some to draw.

Barbie Barnwell manages the Palisade tasting room. She came to it after more than two decades in hospitality in California and Colorado, and she spends time off in the yoga studio and writing poetry. Bella Miranda, Carboy’s marketing coordinator, grew up near Palisade, where the company’s grapes are grown.

Four grapes in silty clay loam

The vineyard around the building covers 11.5 acres of silty clay loam, according to the company. It is planted to Cabernet Franc, Zweigelt, Albariño, and Teroldego. A second estate block, K Vineyard, lies 2.5 miles southwest of the tasting room on 13.4 acres of 20-year-old vines. The company counts the two together as nearly 30 acres. In April 2022 the figures given to The Daily Sentinel were different. Co-owner James Melling described a 13-acre estate, with five more acres newly leased from Jeremy and Cali Ferber, owners of Posey Vineyards.

That spring the Zweigelt was poured as a barrel tasting. Managing partner Craig Jones called it a “fan favorite” and explained the arithmetic behind it: 800 pounds of grapes crushed to make 60 gallons, one full barrel. Teroldego, a grape from northeast Italy, had already brought the company a Best of Show at the 2021 Colorado Governor’s Cup. The winning wine was a 2019, picked from 279 entries sent in by 41 wineries. In 2023 USA Today’s 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards ranked Carboy sixth among wine tasting rooms. Expert panelist Amber Gibson wrote that its “diverse lineup of wine ranges from Albariño and Viognier to Cabernet Franc and Teroldego, with some great sparkling wines too.”

Tanks for Colorado bubbles

The production building next door was built in 2021. It covers 4,000 square feet and makes only sparkling wine. It uses the Charmat method, the process behind Italian Prosecco. A base wine goes through a second fermentation in stainless steel pressure tanks, which trap the bubbles. The process takes two to six weeks, and the wine is bottled without aging, so it keeps a fresh, fruit-forward character.

The sources count the tanks differently. In March 2022 the building had three Charmat tanks, with three more planned by the end of that year. A June 2023 release says instead that five tanks were added in 2022. The location page now calls the facility one of the largest Charmat production facilities outside California. A September 2024 release calls it the largest.

On June 13, 2023, Carboy announced the GRAND series: six sparkling wines in three tiers, two made by the Charmat method and one by the traditional method. The name comes from the Colorado River, once known as the Grand River, which waters the valley. The company planned to make more than 6,000 cases of sparkling wine that year. CEO Kevin Webber said at the launch: “We believe that the popularity of sparkling wine is at an all time high, and could be the future for our state.”

CO.SECCO followed in September 2024. It is a Prosecco-style wine made only from Colorado grapes, described as tasting of green apple, lychee, and citrus zest. Its label was designed with OpenSnow, the forecasting service skiers use, and the wine went on sale October 19 at $28 a bottle. The building also has a greywater recycling system, installed along with mixed irrigation methods meant to cut water use.

Garfield Estate changes hands

A carboy is a large glass vessel used for fermenting, storing, and moving wine. It descends from the demijohn, the French dame-jeanne, a wicker-wrapped bottle common in the Mediterranean and European wine trade from the 17th century. By the time of Colorado’s Gold Rush in the 1800s, merchants and settlers were carrying vessels like it west.

According to Webber’s company biography, he founded Carboy in 2015 with Craig Jones and Tyzok Wharton. The company dates itself from 2016, the year Wharton became founding winemaker and, by the Sentinel’s account, the first winery opened in Littleton. For years the Grand Valley grapes went over the mountains to be made into wine on the Front Range.

The sources differ on when the Palisade property changed hands. The Sentinel reported that Carboy bought the Mt. Garfield Estate in late 2020, and that Melling, a Florida native, then moved to Palisade “to build the winery, vineyard and sparkling program.” A March 2022 press release says Carboy took over the old Garfield Estate Winery & Vineyard about five months before a soft opening on September 18, 2021. The crews renovated the existing tasting room and the estate house beside it, added the rooftop deck, and put up the sparkling building. It became Carboy’s fourth location, after Denver, Littleton, and Breckenridge.

The grand opening began on Saturday, April 23, 2022, together with the valley’s Barrel into Spring event. The festivities ran for a week and closed with Sip into Spring on April 30. The March press release had given the opening date as April 24. That first Saturday, Melling poured for guests and Sean Moon performed. Cindy Davis, who had come from the Denver location to help open Palisade, carried armfuls of bottles out to buyers. Jones told the Sentinel: “We’ve built relationships here over the last six years and (now) we don’t have to ship the grapes to Denver. We can crush the grapes here.” Deidre O’Callaghan, a Palisade resident, looked at the new deck and the young plantings: “In five years, the vines will be so lush.”

The newest addition that week was an outdoor stage for music. Melling said it looked like a tool shed. It had been bought three weeks earlier from Palisade’s Riverbend Park, and it was a restored migrant worker building from 1901. “We plan to restore and protect it so it lasts another 120 years,” Melling said. He meant to research its past and then “put a placard on the side of the building so its history isn’t lost.”