Charleston Peak Winery

The tasting room at Charleston Peak Winery, at the top of Winery Road in Pahrump, is furnished like a parlor. There are barstools and small tables for couples, and couches and loveseats set around coffee tables. Books and games are left out for anyone who stays a while. The room measures 1,450 square feet, and tastings are poured there or on the patio, which looks out on the mountains. Behind the bar is the sommelier Rick Scanlan, a local performer. On the afternoon of August 19, 2026, he played original songs and told stories in the tasting room for two hours.

The food comes from AMARI Italian Kitchen & Wine Shop in Las Vegas, the winery’s sister restaurant. The menu runs to boards and pressed sandwiches. The Charleston Peak Board holds meats, cheese, fruit, bacon and a nut mix. The bacon flight is six pieces of candied thick-cut bacon, served cowboy style with jalapeños, with black pepper, or with maple. There are beef-and-pork meatballs in tomato sauce, a sweet corn bisque by the cup or bowl, a salumi panini of coppa, salami, calabrese and fontina, wood-fired pizza, and chocolate or vanilla gelato. Tastings can be paired with chocolates. The Amargosa Blend goes with a double dark ganache and a floral Riesling with an Aleppo pepper and pineapple ganache. Jean-Marie Auboine’s honey saffron, passionfruit and cinnamon caramel ganaches have also been offered. Tours of the cellar go out on Saturdays and Sundays at noon and 3 p.m.

Estate wines from sun and rock

The winery spans about nine acres at the base of Charleston Peak. The winemaker is Steven Bowen, whose résumé includes the Napa Valley producers Jessup Cellars and Handwritten Wines. His wife, Jenn Sela Bowen, is general manager, and Andy Keselburg is assistant general manager. The estate-grown wines depend on a partnership with the vineyard management company led by Austin Bolton, which the winery calls Bolton Vines. “We’re working with intense sun, rocky soil and limited diurnal shifts, which challenge us to be precise and inventive,” Bowen said in 2025. “Every bottle we produce tells the story of the land.”

The Symphony 2023 is made entirely from Symphony grapes and fermented in stainless steel. The winery describes it as bone dry, with notes of orange blossom, white peach and apricot. Desert Moon is 57 percent Barbera and 43 percent Zinfandel, with a smoky finish. Other wines on the list include an Amargosa red blend, a rosé of Zinfandel, and a Malbec from grapes grown at Dyer in Northern Nevada. The estate sparkling wine is made by the méthode traditionnelle, and the winery calls it the first sparkling wine in the state made from locally grown grapes.

Yount, Buol and the mason jars

Wine grapes grew in the Pahrump Valley long before the present winery, though the accounts of that earlier time do not agree. Art Nadler, writing for the Nye County economic development office, says a man named Joseph Yont ran a winery in Pahrump in 1875 and grew six varieties of grapes. Jack Sanders, who founded the present winery, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2013 that Joseph Yount planted six varietals around the turn of the 20th century.

Next came Frank Buol, called “Pop.” Nadler’s account spells the name Boul and says he bottled wine in a 20-by-20-foot cabin under the name Chateau Bual Santurne. Sanders told the Review-Journal that Buol founded the state’s first commercial winery and produced Chateau Buol wines. He said Buol was bonded by the federal government and that, according to oral history, he sold some of his wine to the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. Whether the business ever paid remains unclear. In Sanders’ telling it died out before Prohibition.

Las Vegas station KTNV places Chateau Buol in the early 1900s and says it probably closed in the 1930s because of Prohibition. Rumor has it, the station reports, that the wine went to friends and family in mason jars and jugs along with other “hooch,” and that the winery was not much more than a hobby. Visit Pahrump says the first winery was bonded in 1930 and never developed.

Jack Sanders and the mustangs

Sanders, a native of Marin County, California, came to Nevada in 1985 as a consultant to mediate the bankruptcy of a company headquartered in Pahrump. He learned of the earlier growers and reasoned that if they could make wine in the Mojave Desert under primitive conditions, a modern operation should yield a bumper crop. “I thought Pahrump would be a perfect place to do something,” he said later. “We are 45 minutes to an hour from Death Valley and the same distance from Las Vegas. This would be a nice side trip that people could take.”

He bought a hilltop. The winery’s own account dates its founding, as Pahrump Valley Vineyards, to 1989. Nadler records that on March 17, 1990, Sanders put up a 13,000-square-foot Mediterranean mission-style building holding a winery, restaurant and bottling plant. It became the first fully licensed winery in Nevada.

Getting there took some maneuvering. The federal government wanted to see construction before granting a license. State law said any alcoholic beverage sold in Nevada had to be imported. Sanders says the attorney general issued him an import license and advised him to drive the six miles to the California border and back, so that he could “import” his own wine. He did so for about a year, until the law was changed. Sanders remembers the official opening in 1990 as “disastrous,” a day on which “we just did really stupid things,” among them opening every facility, the restaurant included, at once.

For a first blend called Sunset, the winery brought in French colombard and riesling from Monterey County, California. In the fall of 1990 it planted its own vineyard in Symphony grapes. The young vines lived through their first winter. Then, one day in late February or early March, Sanders and his cellar master, Ken Walker, were in the vineyard when they saw what Sanders calls “these critters.” They were mustangs, shaggy in winter coats. After a dry winter they had come down from the mountains, drawn by the smell of irrigation water.

The horses belonged to the Bureau of Land Management. The bureau was not liable for damages because the vineyard had no fence, and staff were told not to harass the animals but to clap their hands to scare them off. Sanders said the clapping worked the first time. The second time, the horses fled about half as far. After a few more tries, “You could almost lean on the horse and it would look at you like, ‘Why are you looking at me?’” Government workers rounded the herd up about six weeks later. “Out of that whole episode,” Sanders said, “we lost our vineyards.” National news picked up the story of the upstart winery and the mustangs. “It was devastating,” he said, “but I couldn’t have planned it better.” The winery replanted and kept importing grapes, and released its first vintage in 1992.

By Nadler’s account, the winery was making eight wines by the late 1990s. Among them was Charleston Peak, an off-dry white named for nearby Mount Charleston and sold only at the winery, for $8.50 a bottle. Sanders put the number of visitors at about 115,000 a year. The grounds had two tasting rooms, a covered bandstand, and a helipad nearby for shuttles from Las Vegas. On one day, he said, 12 helicopters landed.

The Loken years

Accounts of the next sale differ. KTNV says the winery went in 2002 to WHR, Inc., a Colorado company, and was placed under the management of Bill and Gretchen Loken. The Pahrump Valley Times gives 2003. Sanders told the Review-Journal it was 2004, a sale he made amid rising land prices to a company belonging to Bill Loken’s brother. The Lokens had come from Arizona, where Bill worked in real estate and Gretchen taught school. Bill had never set foot in a winery. He agreed to take this one over and turn it around for resale, and then the couple took up the trade themselves. By 2005 they were sole owners; KTNV dates the purchase October 1 of that year.

Bill Loken said the property was in rough shape, and the couple gutted the building and added onto the tasting room. In 2005 the winery brought in its first Nevada-exclusive Zinfandel harvest. Aged two years in small oak barrels, it was released on April 16, 2008, as Nevada Ridge. The Lokens believe it was the first commercial bottled red wine in Nevada history. Gretchen earned a winemaking certificate from the University of California, Davis, that same year.

By 2013 the winery bottled four labels: Nevada Ridge, Charleston Peak, Pahrump Valley Winery, and Loken, the reserve. It produced about three-quarters of all Nevada-grown wine and won 46 national awards in 2012 alone. Most of its grapes still came from elsewhere. “We will be bringing in California grapes as far as the eye can see,” Bill Loken said. Later the Lokens added 7,000 square feet, with tanks, presses and a bottling line ordered from Europe. In 2015 the winery harvested 28 tons of Nevada grapes. Its restaurant, Symphony’s, served lobster bisque and a signature plate called the Saint James: filet medallions, crab-stuffed mushrooms and sautéed shrimp under a lobster Crème Sherry sauce.

Closed taps, a new name and the stomp

The Lokens announced the sale on Facebook in early 2019, and the business passed by stock transfer to Nevada Wine Cellars Inc. Nye County suspended its liquor license as of July 13, 2020, after the paperwork the county’s liquor board had asked for did not arrive. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2022, and the winery closed in January 2023.

The property then went to Ernest Moody, of Action Gaming, who had been a lender to the previous owners. “Ernie just didn’t want this place to go away,” Jenn Sela Bowen said. Through the long wait for licenses the staff stayed on salary and renovated slowly. Pahrump Valley Community News reported the winery open on a short schedule in September 2024. The Pahrump Valley Times dates the official opening, under the new name, to August 2025, after more than two and a half years closed. The name nods to Mount Charleston, and it had been on the shelf before. “The original Charleston Peak label is still here,” Bowen said in 2024, “and we’re keeping key wines like the Symphony and Desert Blush.”

The Grape Stomp has its own history. Sanders started it in 1991, and the Lokens kept it going until 2019, the last year it was held on Winery Road. By then Sanders had opened Sanders Family Winery on Kellogg Road, and he revived the stomp there in October 2024. Teams of two competed: one stomped grapes in a barrel while the other kept the juice flowing for measurement. Thirty or 35 teams entered. The 2026 Grape Stomp is set for Saturday, October 10, back at the top of Winery Road, with stomping competitions, live music, local vendors and a costume contest.