Colterris Winery

Third Street leaves Palisade and becomes North River Road, and at number 3907 it reaches the Colterris production site and its tasting courtyard. All the seating is outdoors. From the tables a visitor looks over estate vines to the Colorado River and the opening of De Beque Canyon, with the Book Cliffs above and the Roan Plateau at the canyon mouth. The vines around the building are Riverside Vineyard, planted in 1991 and 1998, and the winery stands among them at about 4,800 feet. Walk-ins are seated as tables come free. When the weather turns, the company sends guests to its indoor room in town.

Every day at 1:00 p.m. a guide takes a party of no more than twelve through the winery and the barrel room and down into an underground barrel cave, pouring seven current releases along the way. The tour ends in the cave’s wine library. Everything poured here grew on the estate, which the company’s own pages put at 200 acres along the river, with over 75 acres of it in vines. The state wine board’s listing gives 190 acres. Under the federal rule for the word “Estate” on a label, the grapes are crushed, fermented, aged, and bottled on the premises, and the wine never leaves during production. The name follows from that practice: “Col” for Colorado and terris, the ablative plural of the Latin terra, which the winery renders as “from the Colorado land.”

On summer Fridays the courtyard stays open from five to eight for Summer SunSets, with live bands, local food trucks, and free admission. The winery tells people to bring lawn chairs. Harvest brings Wine Festivus, which the winery calls a Colterris tradition. On September 18 and 19, 2026, The Long Run, billed as Colorado’s tribute to the Eagles, played two nights in the vines, with gates open at 6 p.m. The 2026 harvest itself began with the Blessing of the Grapes, which the winery described as “a toast to the first grapes of the year and the vintage ahead.”

The Overlook on East Orchard Mesa

The second tasting room stands at 3548 E ½ Road on East Orchard Mesa. It opens from May through October, noon to five. Its courtyard is set among peach orchards, the Two Brothers Vineyard, lavender, and rose gardens, and it looks out over the Colorado River. An outdoor pavilion there is used for weddings. Keenan High, the founders’ son, has described the evenings on the mesa: “every night, what we see at sunset, from the place I am right sitting now at Orchard Mesa, which is about 100 feet above the Colorado River, is that the cold air drops down to follow the river and the warm air takes its place.” He calls the spring and summer wind through the valley “the million-dollar breeze because it saves millions of dollars in crops every year.”

In August 2026 the Overlook held afternoon floral workshops, with guests arranging flowers over a glass of wine. On Saturday, August 22, during Peach Fest, the winery’s Corks & Forks dinner series returned to the orchard for a Field to Fork dinner among the peach trees. The winery said it had been years since the last one. Chefs Jason Fang and Nate Williams cooked apricot chowchow, peach gazpacho, and confit duck with stone fruit. The September dinner brought Italian cooking from Chef Enzo Favale of Enzo’s Ristorante Italiano. October’s dinner, called Wine-toberfest, took German cuisine for its theme and Grüner Veltliner among its pairings, with Chef Matt Tezak returning to the table.

Six vineyards named for a family

The estate’s grapes come from six vineyards, three of them named for members of the High family. Theresa’s Vineyard holds 20,700 Cabernet Sauvignon vines in six clones, planted in 2001. The winery counts it among the largest contiguous plantings of that grape in the Grand Valley AVA. It supplies the flagship Cabernet Sauvignon and the Coral White Cabernet Sauvignon, a rosé. Scott’s Vineyard was planted in Malbec and Cabernet Franc between 2012 and 2014 on an old cherry orchard, on what the winery calls one of the highest irrigated hills in Mesa County. Katie’s Vineyard grows Cabernet Franc planted in 1989, which the winery says are some of the oldest vines in the valley.

The other three take their names from the ground. Vinelands, planted in 1995, holds the estate’s largest block of Chardonnay, near a calm stretch of the river. Riverside is the most varied site, with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, and Chardonnay. The winery says canyon winds follow the river past it. At Cliffside, the Book Cliffs radiate heat over Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, Malbec, Pinot Gris, and Syrah. After the frost of 2021, about half of Riverside’s Cabernet vines had to be retrained from the ground up. The survivors went into a 2022 Old Vine Cabernet of 160 cases.

Two winemakers share the cellar, an expense Scott High defends: “Winemaking isn’t just science. There’s an artistic feel to it.” Bo Felton grew up in Colorado. Each vintage his grandfather drove a van of grapes from California, and the family de-stemmed them by hand. Felton later made wine at Duckhorn’s Goldeneye and Migration division and worked a harvest in New Zealand. Assistant winemaker Justin Jannusch had worked at BookCliff Vineyards since 2006. Their 2016 and 2017 Petit Verdots each took double gold in the Governor’s Cup Collection.

Corkscrews, tastevins, and a bank table

The year-round room, Colterris Collections, is at 3708 G Road off Highway 6 near downtown, in what was formerly the Plum Creek Winery. Plum Creek Cellars, founded in 1984, was one of Colorado’s oldest modern wineries. Colterris pours Plum Creek Heritage wines here, a Festival White, a Palisade Rosé, and a Palisade Red. A dining room added to the building, the Tastevin Room, seats 34. Its center table seats 18; it is solid oak, made in the 1950s, and Scott High says it served as a conference table in the First National Bank Building of Denver. Every seat faces the chef at work.

A tastevin is a small shiny cup. Scott High explains that from the 15th and 16th centuries wine merchants carried them down into dark cellars to judge a wine’s color and clarity by candlelight. About 300 are on display. They are one part of a private collection of more than 16,000 pieces of wine memorabilia. Scott High once considered calling it a museum, and Theresa High was reluctant. He came round to her view. He took the name “Collections” from the Vatican Collections and from a gallery of that name in Napa Valley. The exhibit space opened on a June 23, after the building had served as a tasting room for a couple of years.

Scott High counts “probably close to 18,000 antique corkscrews”; Denver7 reported more than 5,000 on display. He bought the first at 16. He had a $400 Chevrolet Biscayne and any excuse to drive it, and in a store on Antique Row on South Broadway in Denver a small corkscrew caught his eye in a case. He saved up for it. Denver7 dates the purchase to 1971, and it is on display. Among the others is a corkscrew that received the first corkscrew patent, in 1795. Colterris has bottled its own wine under a Stelvin screw cap for years. “So I don’t need a corkscrew to open my wine,” he said. “But if I did, I have plenty of them.”

Other cases hold all seven programs from seven French wine festivals of the 1930s. “It took me 40 years to find this last one,” he told Denver7. Beside a wine list Mickey Mantle signed at his New York restaurant sits a baseball signed by John Elway. “The story about Elway and Mickey Mantle is they had their entire careers in the outfield for the Yankees,” he said. “Mickey was there 14 years and John was there 42 games.”

One small silver cup draws the longest story. As Scott High tells it, Napoleon, during his hundred days in 1815, agreed to stop at the village of Saint Jean de Braye outside Orleans as a favor to an adjutant from the place. He parked his troops and rode a white horse into the village, where several hundred people waited at the town hall. The mayor presented him with a tastevin engraved with the date of the visit. Napoleon accepted it, gave his speech, and on the way down the steps handed it back. High gives the emperor’s words as “I’m not taking your silver.”

On Friday evenings from October through June the room holds Collections After Dark, with a different food truck each week and the cases open after hours to anyone carrying a glass. The winery’s own description of the corkscrews: “Some are elegant, some are strange, and a few will leave you wondering what they were for.” Scott High recalls two local women who arrived saying, “We have to bring our husbands,” and left saying, “We’ve got to bring our husbands.”

The collection had been meant for another building. In March 2020 the Palisade Board of Trustees voted unanimously to vacate part of a street right-of-way beside the Lion Mountain Fruit Building, built in 1908, at 244 W. Third St. There Scott High had proposed a wine museum and wine bar.

A peach orchard and a promise

Scott High’s father ran a wine shop in Denver, and a bottle came to the family table every Sunday. At 12, Denver7 reports, the boy was riding his 10-speed to the Denver Public Library for books on wine. “At one point the librarian called my mom and asked her if it was OK that I check out books on wine, cause I was that young, and she said, ‘Certainly,’” he said. He graduated from Colorado State University in 1978 and studied viticulture in Geisenheim, Germany, sponsored by a Denver wine wholesaler. In 14 years with Seagram he and Theresa tasted wine from much of the world.

In 1999, by his account, they bought a ten-acre peach orchard outside Palisade to learn whether Colorado could make wine to stand with the best. Keenan High, born that year, remembers it differently: the family moved in 2000 and bought 11 acres. He says his parents meant to pull the trees for vines, then decided, “These peaches are too good. We can’t take out these trees.” Accounts of the promise behind the vineyard vary too. Keenan gives his father’s proposal as “I will not promise you a rose garden, but I will promise you a vineyard.” Scott says only that he “might have expressed” a vineyard was likelier than a rose garden. Some time in 2000, Keenan says, his mother asked, “Where’s the vineyard?”

The orchard grew into High Country Orchards. By 2010 it held 71 acres of peaches in more than two dozen varieties, and First Lady Michelle Obama and her children had come for the fruit. The vineyard came in 2008, a 19-acre planting that the orchard’s manager, Tony Fernandez, with more than three decades of Napa experience, had set out in 2001. It became Theresa’s Vineyard. With no winery of their own yet, the Highs had Tyrel Lawson make the first wine, a 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon released in the summer of 2010. It took silver at that year’s Colorado Mountain WineFest and bronze at the Governor’s Cup. Keenan dates the first tasting room to 2010; a November 2010 article gave its opening as spring 2011.

Keenan ran a country store for the orchard from the age of nine and began giving agricultural tours at ten. He is now operations director, and his sister Katie runs marketing. On vineyard tours, he says, guests still remark, “Oh, we got a little kid for the tour, huh?” Theresa High settles the division of the place in one line: “I got the vineyard, Scott got his museum.”