Chill Switch Wines

At Chill Switch Wines the tasting is poured on the head of a barrel. Dave Aschwanden, owner and winemaker, takes visitors into the winery, shows them the barrels and what he does with them, and sets out the glasses. “There’s no strawberry flavoring or any other freaky stuff that I add to the wine,” he told Thirst Colorado in 2020. “You taste the wines right there on the top of the barrel, and we have a conversation about what we like about wine and what we think wine should be.” Tastings are by appointment only.

The winery is at his home off Surface Creek Road northeast of Cedaredge, in Delta County, about an hour south of Palisade. In 2020 the Aschwandens kept a wild orchard, a berry patch and a handful of animals there. Out back is a vineyard of about an acre and a half, planted as a test plot to see what would grow at 6,800 feet. Aschwanden told the Daily Sentinel in 2024 that it needs more upkeep and that he would like a larger vineyard someday. For now he buys grapes from the region, Palisade among the sources. The winery says all of its grapes are grown within an hour of the place. The operation runs entirely on solar power, and in 2026 it received the Slow Food Snail of Approval.

A building with no thermostat

Aschwanden built the winemaking building himself and gave it no climate control for any season. Inside, the temperature reaches about 70 degrees in summer and falls to about 45 in winter. He credits that swing, heat in one season and cold in the other, with a natural process that keeps him from using additives and filters. In the same building stands a wine rack he built, a holdover from his years as a cabinetmaker. It holds hundreds of bottles, mostly Chill Switch, along with some of the Crag Crest labels he still has left over.

The rest of the method is spelled out on the winery’s pages. The grapes are picked by hand from local growers. They ferment on the wild yeast that settles on the fruit in the vineyard. The wine is neither fined nor filtered, and a small amount of sulfites goes in just before bottling. Every bottle carries a disclaimer listing the things the winery does not do. Aschwanden uses French oak barrels and no other kind. “It’s not a right or wrong decision, it’s just a type call on my part,” he told the Sentinel. “I just feel French oak is lot more vanilla butterscotchy.”

The sources differ on aging. The Colorado Wine listing gives 30 months in French oak for the reds and stainless steel for the whites. The winery’s older site gives the same 30 months for reds and says the whites spend 18 to 30 months in stainless steel and neutral oak. Aschwanden told the Sentinel he likes making reds best: “Reds are kinda my thing, and they are also a little more forgiving in natural winemaking.”

Twenty-three wines and a road schedule

The current list runs to twenty-three wines. Aschwanden named his steady sellers to the Sentinel in 2024: Teroldego, Mourvèdre, Petit Verdot and the Super Colorado Red, a five-grape blend, with Gewurztraminer the strongest of the whites. The list also includes a Viognier made orange by skin contact, a Gamay Noir he calls his “chillable red,” and a late-harvest Verona that is dry, with notes of dried plum and fig. At the 2025 Governor’s Cup the 2022 Mourvèdre took silver and the 2022 Teroldego bronze. The paintings on the labels are by Jennifer Riefenberg, a fourth-generation Coloradan and plein air painter. In 2020 the winery made 1,000 cases a year. Aschwanden told the Sentinel in 2024 that he expects to narrow the list and concentrate on his strongest wines.

Because the winery is remote, Aschwanden spends much of the year pouring elsewhere. In 2026 he poured Gewurztraminer beside Zoe Ma Ma’s meatballs at Taste of Pearl in Boulder on March 29. On May 29 he held a free tasting at the Kissflower in Paonia, next to chef Joseph’s food. He poured at Vino and Notes in Woodland Park on August 1, in Bond Park for the Estes Park Winefest on August 8 and 9, and at Palmer Lake on September 12. Wine club members come to the winery for an annual dinner every Labor Day weekend. In 2026 it fell on September 5.

Harvest happens on the place in fall. The 2025 crush took in Gamay, Chenin Blanc, Syrah, Petit Verdot, Gewurztraminer, Chambourcin, a late-harvest Viognier and Mourvèdre. Aschwanden also posted a picture of quince, “not for the crush, just pretty!” On the morning of October 7, 2025, the crew picked Gewurztraminer at Bob’s vineyard before the crush. The winery often hires an apprentice for events and harvest and provides housing. The apprentice works beside Aschwanden through crushing, fermentation and bottling.

Apricots, cabinets and Woody Creek

The winery’s site traces Aschwanden’s craft to generations of Swiss ancestors. The accounts of his start differ. Mark Condon wrote in the Delta County Independent in 2021 that Aschwanden was first introduced to winemaking by his family in Lausanne, Switzerland, where his parents made Gamay and Pinot Noir. Thirst Colorado reported that he grew up in Colorado and caught the wine bug while he and his wife, Christie, were living in Europe. The winery’s own page says he fell in love with wine while traveling there.

His first wine came from a surplus of fruit. “I made jam, I dried the apricots, I froze the apricots, and I still had a thousand pounds left,” he told Thirst. “So, I decided to make some wine. And it turned out fairly awful, of course.” By the Sentinel’s count he made wine as an amateur for about twenty years.

His trade was wood. He coached Nordic skiing at Colorado Mesa University and worked as a woodworker and cabinetmaker during the housing boom. “Then it all collapsed,” he said of 2008. “I took a job at a winery, because I just needed a job.” The winery was Woody Creek Cellars, down the road in Austin and since closed. There his mentor, the late Kevin Doyle, taught him to make wine without additives and let him try things. “I’d say, ‘can I throw four (different kind of) grapes in here, can I use six grapes?’ And I really learned a lot doing that,” Aschwanden said. “A couple of years into it, I became obsessed and possessed, and realized this is what I wanted.”

Christie Aschwanden, executive director of the Grand Mesa Nordic Council, backed the move. “She just encouraged me and supported me,” he said. “She knew I was passionate about it.” From 2012 to almost 2017, he told the Sentinel, he did not pay himself at all.

From Crag Crest to Chill Switch

He opened in 2012 as Crag Crest Wines, named for the trail on Grand Mesa. He told Thirst it was one of his favorite places: “you can see 360 degrees, from the La Salle Mountains to the San Juans to the West Elks.” The name gave customers trouble. “I couldn’t believe how bad people were butchering that name, there were all these different variations,” he told the Sentinel.

In 2014 he drew up a list of replacements. He wanted a name that was easy to say over the phone, easy to spell, not already taken, and tied to a state of mind. He considered his Swiss surname for only a few minutes. “Saying it over the phone and spelling it, my last name would have been a tough one,” he said. He settled on Chill Switch and put bright colors on the new labels. “I really didn’t like it for about six months, then I realized it hits all my points I had set,” he said. He has since served on the board of the Colorado Association for Viticulture and Enology, which puts on the Colorado Mountain Winefest in Palisade each September.

“It’s not after a tree, a hill or a rock, a river or a family name,” Aschwanden told the Sentinel. “You go home and pull this cork and I hope the wine takes you there.”