Chateau Tumbleweed

The tasting room on 89A

The tasting room stands on the hillside at 1151 West State Route 89A in Clarkdale, a short way from Cottonwood and Jerome. Guests sit either in a room furnished like a living room or out on a patio that admits dogs and looks across the Verde Valley. Green Living Magazine singled out the view of Sycamore Canyon. The winery itself, rated at 7,000 cases, is on the same premises and can be seen from the tasting room. Phoenix magazine in 2019 called the patio “airy” and “roadside.”

More than a dozen wines are poured each day, white, red, and rosé, by the glass or in flights. Green Living listed three flights, light, red blends, and deluxe, each of four wines chosen to go together. The only food on the premises is a charcuterie plate of meats, cheeses, fruits, nuts, and crackers, packed in a bento box. The same magazine reported a monthly Vibe Night with a food truck and music that changes genre from month to month. Kris Pothier, a co-owner and the general manager, draws the labels. In 2017 a reviewer described them as ornate drawings that work in the tumbleweed.

The staff list shows Morgan and Brennan as Tasting Room Manager Gurus and Colton, Lana, and Bonnie as Tasting Room Gurus. In the cellar are Erin, cellar master, and Lou and Emma, cellar hands. Pothier has said what she set out to make: “I’ve been into a lot of tasting rooms in my life that made me feel uncomfortable and want to hug the wall, and that was the only thing really that we intended, that we try to make a warm, engaging space where people came in and wanted to relax and drink some wine.”

A refrigerated truck to Willcox

Chateau Tumbleweed has no vineyard of its own. Its fruit comes from growers in three counties. In Cochise County there are eight vineyards at about 4,300 feet, among them Cimarron, Pillsbury, Rhumb Line, and Deep Sky, and three more at about 4,400 feet, including Dos Padres and House Mountain. The twelfth is Sierra Bonita, in Graham County, at about 3,500 feet. Green Living named the source estates as being in Willcox and in Cornville.

In 2025 the winemaker, Joe Bechard, told Sedona Monthly how harvest works: “It’s bordering on insane. We rent a refrigerated truck that can haul six tons at a time. And basically, that truck is going down to Willcox and coming back with fruit every other day.” On the days between, fruit arrives from D.A.Ranch in Cornville. Jeff Hendricks, a partner, stays down in the vineyards running tests and deciding what gets picked and which truck it goes on. “It’s a logistical feat, a nightmare, but I love it,” Bechard said.

The tasting list shows the result. A visitor can compare three syrahs or a couple of cabernet francs side by side. “There’s Sangiovese from three different vineyards across Arizona, here’s cab sauv from three different vineyards or four different vineyards,” Bechard told Arizona Highways TV.

That program filmed one morning of harvest. It was a sunny Sunday, a couple of hours before the tasting room opened. Pothier was punching down a tank of Sierra Bonita cabernet sauvignon, about 30 percent of it fermented as whole clusters. “We use the entire cluster to get a little sweetness and tannen and spice from the stems,” she said. “This is about five days into its fermenting process, the conversion is happening, and you can really start to get hints of what the nose is going to be.” She and Bechard were steaming oak barrels and getting ready to put the new harvest into them. Sedona Monthly gave annual output in 2025 as about 5,000 cases. Green Living had earlier put it at 5,500.

From Eugene to Page Springs

Bechard grew up in Boise, Idaho. He studied journalism at the University of Oregon. He and Pothier met there while both worked at Turtles Bar and Grill in Eugene. The owner let them finish open bottles at the end of the night, and that is how they came to love Oregon Pinot. His first reporting job out of college was at the Sedona Red Rock News. While there he learned that Arizona had a small wine industry, and in 2005, he said, he “switched gears and went from enjoying wine to making it.” Arizona Highways TV says he went to work at Page Springs Cellars a year after he arrived. Green Living gives 2008 as the year he and Pothier were both hired there. Bechard has said he spent his first five years under Eric Glomski, the Page Springs winemaker, and called him “a great, great first mentor to have.”

“We all walked into the industry at a time when there weren’t very many people involved, so we were given badges to do things that otherwise people would clamor for or go to school for, so we learned on the job,” Pothier said.

At Page Springs they met the other couple, Kim Koistinen and Jeff Hendricks. According to the Phoenix New Times, those two had come from the San Francisco tech business. By 2014 Koistinen was keeping the books at Page Springs, and Hendricks was its director of vineyard operations. “The four of us saw the industry starting to grow and realized we had complementary skill sets and our own point of view, so we started work on a business plan,” Pothier told Green Living.

She has explained the name in two ways. To Green Living: “We blew in and got stuck in the fence of AZ wine.” To a CITYSunTimes writer in 2017: “We had no intent to be in Arizona or in wine. We kind of got stuck in the fence of the wine industry.” The Oregon start shows in one of the wines. Bechard calls Willy, a blend of grenache, syrah, and tempranillo, an homage to Oregon pinot noir, made to taste familiar to people who drink it.

Three barrels and a co-op

The first wine was made in 2011. It was three barrels of whole-cluster merlot, made, by the New Times account, while Bechard was working for Alcantara Vineyards. Green Living gives that first release as 75 cases. The New Times put three barrels at “basically just under 300 cases.”

Maynard James Keenan, the rock musician who owns Caduceus Cellars, invited the four to make wine at Four Eight Wineworks. He had set it up for winemakers who had skill but little money. It was a shared space with a press, destemmer, crushing equipment, bottling line, and fermentation tanks, all paid for by Keenan. Arizona law at first did not provide for several wineries using one site in rotation, so his tenants made wine under the Caduceus license. The law changed in 2014, and Four Eight became a true cooperative. The winery’s own account places Four Eight in Camp Verde. The New Times placed it in Clarkdale.

Chateau Tumbleweed made the 2012, 2013, and 2014 vintages at Four Eight. Output was 500 cases in 2012 and 1,000 in 2013. All four partners kept other jobs during these years. Bechard managed Four Eight, and Pothier ran shipping and receiving for Caduceus. In January 2014 the list ran to seven wines, with fruit from Yavapai and Cochise counties and from Luna County, New Mexico. Among them were Wild Will E. Cox, Admiral Star Sailor, The Bigness, Uncle Tannat, Lil’ Frankie, and an Arneis. On Valentine’s Day that year the Four Eight tasting room held a Chateau Tumbleweed Night, with barrel samples of the 2013 vintage.

The building on the highway

In 2015 the partners bought a building on Highway 89A that they had been watching for a year and turned it into a winery and tasting room. The winery calls it one of Clarkdale’s first commercial wineries and tasting rooms. D.A.Ranch’s history calls it the town’s first. The Petznick family, owners of D.A.Ranch, had already hired the four and also put money into the new venture. According to the ranch, D.A.Ranch has had its estate-grown wines made and bottled only by the Tumbleweed team since 2015. Bechard is the ranch’s winemaker as well, and he said he made its first wine at Page Springs “back in ‘06 or something.” The Chateau Tumbleweed staff page now lists Earl and Melinda among the owners.

By early 2017 the winery had made two harvests in the new building and was already short of room. That year’s CITYSunTimes column tasted a 2015 ‘Miss Sandy Jones’ blend of chardonnay and verdelho and a 2015 Cimarron Vineyard graciano fermented as whole clusters. “We take our winemaking very seriously, but not ourselves. We like to have fun and take out the ‘snobby’ of wine,” Bechard said then. At the 2018 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition the winery won Best in Class and Double Gold. Wine Business Monthly later named Bechard its Winemaker of the Month.

When Bechard began making wine, he said in 2025, Arizona had about 10 wineries, and by then it had more than 100. Asked how he would like his work remembered, he answered: “All I would hope is that our contribution to Arizona wine is remembered.”