Continental Divide Winery

The Fairplay tasting room of Continental Divide Winery is in the Rocky Top Center at 331 U.S. Highway 285, with free surface parking out front. Two flights are poured at the counter. The curated tasting is a run of reds and whites chosen by the owners and the winemaker from vineyards across Colorado. The Limited Release Tasting Experience sets out four of the winery’s rare limited release and reserve wines at $50 a person. Wine is also sold by the glass and the bottle, and the last flight goes out half an hour before closing.

The wine is made here too. A 2023 account in Thirst Colorado places production in Fairplay, with a second tasting room over the passes in Breckenridge. The winery’s own pages name Dan Kraft as senior winemaker and invite visitors to the South Park location to ask him for a behind-the-scenes tour. Kraft is from Western Colorado and took up fermentation homebrewing at Colorado College. He finished a chemistry degree there in 2011, then worked at Navarro Vineyards in California’s Anderson Valley. He earned a master’s in food science with an enology concentration at Oregon State University, worked at Kevin White Winery in Washington, and made his own label, Seekseekqua, from organic vineyards in the Willamette Valley.

Wine at ten thousand feet

The winery’s claim rests on elevation, and each source gives its own figure. An early listing on the Colorado Wine site gave 10,361 feet and called Continental Divide the highest winery in America. In 2018 co-founder Jeffrey Maltzman told 5280 that Alma’s 10,361 feet made the operation the highest-altitude winery on the planet, ahead of its closest competitor, in Chile, by about 30 feet. Co-founder Kent Hutchison put the Alma and Fairplay works at 10,300 feet in 2017. Thirst Colorado wrote “nearly 10,000 feet” in 2023. The winery’s Instagram calls it the highest altitude winery in the world.

Maltzman gave 5280 his explanation of the altitude. Oxygen is needed for fermentation, but once the wine is ready to bottle, oxygen degrades its aromas and can alter its color, so the thin air lets the wine keep more of its character. Angela Bryan described a plainer advantage to the Boulder Daily Camera in 2017. California wineries, she said, spend tens of thousands of dollars on chillers to bring fermenting wine down in temperature. “In Fairplay, we roll the wine outside and it cools down overnight in the mountain air.”

The name comes from what is poured. The winery sets the same varietals, grown on opposite sides of the Continental Divide, side by side. 5280 described the divide as “the chain of high terrain that separates water that drains eastward into the Atlantic Ocean from water that flows westward into the Pacific.” Colorado grapes go into one bottle and California grapes into its mate. In 5280’s 2018 account, the Colorado merlot showed stronger floral aromas, while the California merlot ran to a berry-rich nose and cherry flavor. General manager John Bellncula credited the extra complexity in the Colorado red to the Grand Valley’s hotter and shorter growing season. Hutchison described a blind test in which visitors are poured one or the other and asked which they prefer. “Often times they’re very surprised they picked the Colorado wine.”

Grapes over the passes

The Colorado fruit comes from the Western Slope, and the haul up to the winery is the hard part. “You drive down to the Palisades and it’s 70 degrees there, and then you have to pull the grapes all the way over the passes—sometimes in the snow,” Hutchison told the Daily Camera. “So, you’re shoveling grapes in the snow.” In the first year, a bear pulled bags of grapes out of the back of his truck, and he spent the rest of that season looking over his shoulder. In 2017 a mama moose and a baby moose stood next to the trailer.

Bryan said the harvest, from the beginning of September to the middle or end of October, falls in Colorado’s most volatile weather, and a whole crop can be lost. Hutchison added that a cold snap at bud break, during the crazy snowstorms Colorado can get in April, can knock everything out.

One wine carries the valley’s own name for a festival. The Haulin’ Ass rosé, made from three Colorado-grown varietals, is named for Burro Days, which 5280 called South Park’s signature summer festival. Bellncula likened it to “adult Kool-Aid.” The 2018 vintage took a gold at the Colorado Governor’s Cup and the 2023 a bronze. In 2017 Bryan said the town of Fairplay sold the winery’s bottles at its own events through the year.

Two families on Main Street

The winery dates its story to 2014, on Main Street in Breckenridge. Jeffrey and Ana Maltzman were California vintners and part-time Breckenridge residents. In 2016 the Summit Daily reported they had been in the California wine business for six years and owned two wineries there, which 5280 named as Navigator Wines and Gold Creek Vineyards. Maltzman told the Summit Daily how they met the other family:

“We were both walking through the little main plaza right downtown in front of the tourist office. My wife, myself and my two daughters and our two Australian Shepherds were walking one direction, and Kent and Angela, and their two daughters, and their two Australian Shepherds were walking the other direction. We just had to stop and talk and we’ve been fast friends ever since.”

Hutchison and Bryan, husband and wife, taught and did research in CU Boulder’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. For more than a decade they had made wine at home, and Hutchison remembered the turn plainly. “At one point Angela sat me down and said, basically, ‘Look, if we can’t sell our wine we can’t make it anymore because it’s stacking up in the garage and making a big mess.’ And, it wasn’t the best wine either.” The Maltzmans traced their own start to a wine blending class they took together several years before. “Of everything that I get to do as a winemaker, by far and away the most fun is wine blending,” Jeffrey Maltzman said.

From Alma to Highway 285

The two families founded Continental Divide Winery in 2016. The first location opened in Alma that summer. By October the Summit Daily reported a Fairplay site under construction that would take over as the main production site. The company was buying Colorado grapes from existing growers, and Maltzman noted that a vineyard planted then would not yield saleable wine for several years. The Breckenridge tasting room at Main Street Station was set to open around the holidays that year.

The work was divided by the Divide. Maltzman took the California wines; his 2012 Napa Valley Captain’s Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon had been declared the best 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon in the world by Sunset Magazine. Hutchison and Bryan took the Colorado side, sourcing Western Slope grapes for cabernet sauvignon, merlot and riesling. Consulting winemaker Jay Christianson, formerly senior winemaker at Canyon Wind Cellars, worked with them. In 2019 the Summit Daily described Hutchison and Bryan as Alma residents.

During the total solar eclipse of 2017 the winery blended six wines into Double Eclipse, then released it during the total lunar eclipse the following year. In the 2019 Sunset Magazine International Wine Competition, which drew 2,700 entries, Continental Divide took two of the three gold medals awarded to Colorado wineries. The winners were an artist series Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon and Reflection, a Bordeaux-style blend of merlot, malbec, cabernet sauvignon and petit verdot. In the 2024 Best of Summit voting it placed first in four categories, among them Best Wines and Best Apres Ski. The High Country Conservation Center has certified it a Gold Medal Business for environmental sustainability.

The winery’s own account now runs through one family. Jeffrey Maltzman is president. Ana Maltzman is vice president and Chief Tasting Officer. Their daughters, Lexie and Jess, work the bottling line and the tasting rooms when home from college. Hutchison and Bryan have left the Front Range, and the winery says their wines are still periodically featured. The two Australian Shepherds of the Main Street meeting have given way, in the winery’s telling, to Scout, a Bernese Mountain Dog. He is the official winery dog and a frequent visitor to the tasting room, and he accepts pets and snacks from all friendly humans.