I/G Winery

The tasting room at 59 West Center Street in downtown Cedar City has a fireplace, brick, repurposed wood, soft music and comfortable seating, with a patio outside for fresh air. Melissa Fields, writing for Visit Utah, noted velvet-covered sofas and locally made art. The wines are made, blended and vinted on the premises, and the production area is open for tours daily. Restaurants, the Southern Utah Museum of Art and the Utah Shakespeare Festival share the street. In 2017 The Salt Lake Tribune placed the winery within walking distance of the Southern Utah University campus, where the festival plays.

Owner and winemaker Doug McCombs buys grapes from California, Oregon, Washington and Utah. The winery names Napa, Sonoma, the Columbia and Rogue Valleys and the Greater Zion area among its sources, and an older company page adds Twin Peaks and the Sierra Foothills. Fields counted 20 wines in all.

Four pours and a port

The flights need no reservation. The White Flight, at $22, is four one-ounce pours that move from light, crisp whites into a rosé. The Red Flight is also four pours, and the tasting stewards fit it to the drinker, “from soft and elegant, to hearty and robust.” The Mix & Match, at $26, gives two whites and two reds, then a one-ounce pour of Full Moon Love, a port-style dessert wine, with a piece of dark chocolate. The $40 Reserve Flight pairs three pours from the reserve collection with the same port and chocolate. By reservation, the Barrel Room Tasting seats a guest one-on-one with a sommelier over small bites and five wines, the last drawn straight from a barrel.

The by-the-glass list carries its own tasting notes. The Pinot Noir is “cherry, mushroom & forest floor,” the Merlot Rosé “strawberry, cherry, dust,” and the reserve Petit Verdot “game meats, dried herbs & minerality.” Two house blends come in a second, barrel-finished form: Tempest and Rum Barrel Tempest, Seduction and Bourbon Seduction. Fields wrote that the Barrel Aged Seduction, a red blend of California grapes, “tastes like Christmas in a bottle.” She described 9 Barrels Red as a Merlot made from grapes grown on Pine Valley Mountain, northwest of St. George.

The winery holds a bar license, and the cocktail list draws on the cellar. The I/Gin & Riesling mixes gin, Riesling, pear liqueur, St. Germaine and bitters. The Maple Manhattan uses Full Moon Love, and the Seductive Bourbon uses the bourbon-barrel Seduction. Others on the card are Caitie’s Hard Iced Tea, the Instant Gratifashioned and The Arrogant Bastard, made of cognac, B&B, vermouth and bitters. Monthly specialty cocktails rotate through, and the draft and canned beer selections change as well. To eat there is a charcuterie board, a cocoa platter and a pesto bread plate.

Saturday nights and royal icing

The room stays open until 11 on Fridays and Saturdays, and on Saturday nights a band plays from 7 to 10. The autumn 2026 calendar lists Kole Saxton on October 10, the Cedar Jazz Project on October 17 and November 14, Dylan Thomas Gavin on October 24, River Dan on November 7, the Trevor Davis Group on November 21 and Mr.OK on November 28.

Weeknights bring classes. At a Paint & Sip on October 7, guests paint a “Witch Gnome” on a 16-by-20-inch canvas with the supplies provided. Love Cookies Bakery runs cookie classes where each person decorates six sugar cookies in royal icing and then poses at a themed photo booth. They are set for Halloween on October 21, Thanksgiving on November 11 and Christmas on December 9. Earlier in 2026 the winery held a Father’s Day patio barbecue on June 20 and a glass coaster making class on August 18.

The people behind the bar carry sommelier titles. Laura Cookson is operations manager. Jason Kramer is a winemaker and cellar manager. Michelle mixes the drinks, and Caitie and Austin Sorrels serve as assistant winemakers. Stephanie, Dennie, Michael, Natalie and Sevanna work as tasting stewards. Bill manages the vineyard.

A cottage behind the Iron Gate

McCombs came to wine from the casino industry in Las Vegas, where he worked in human resources. There he was exposed to fine food and then fine wine, according to Fields, and began working toward becoming a sommelier. “But I found that I was more interested in wine production,” McCombs told her. He learned winemaking from experts in Washington State and Sonoma County, California. When he looked for a place to open his own winery, he settled on Cedar City.

Southern Utah had made wine before. Fields writes that pioneer horticulturists planted the first wine grapes there around 1850. Brigham Young, hearing how well the vines did, sent church members to launch a wine mission. The wine was traded to farmers in northern Utah for potatoes and wheat. Around the turn of the century the church moved toward teetotaling, and the project was abandoned. The winery’s own account says that when it opened in 2012, the region had had no wineries since the 1860s.

That account also describes how hard the opening was. With no wineries in the area, there were no zoning rules for one. Lenders did not know how to evaluate the business, and city leaders were unsure how to license it. McCombs and his partners assembled investors and banks, and helped the city write zoning codes that allowed wineries. The first I/G Winery opened in a small converted cottage behind the Iron Gate Bed & Breakfast. Family and friends helped with construction and winemaking, and they sold wine from the little shed next door.

The inn is a Victorian house at 100 North 200 West that David Thorley built in 1897 for his family. In 2016 innkeeper Donna Shattuck-Johnson was sending her guests to the “Iron Gate Winery, located on property,” for tastings. Iron Gate Winery was the business’s original name. An older company page offers another reading of the initials, saying the winery strives to provide “Instant Gratification.”

From the garden to Center Street

In April 2017, after five years, the winery moved downtown. The Tribune, which called it Cedar City’s only winemaking facility, reported double the production space and a larger tasting room. The paper gave the address as 39 W. Center St.; the winery now lists 59. The old building had been surrounded by a lush English garden. “I hated giving up that garden,” McCombs told the paper. “But we focused on the inside [of the new building] and really made the tasting room beautiful with reclaimed wood and more space.”

The winery describes itself as still family owned. The teenagers who once crawled in the wine tanks and rode old pallets on the forklift are slowly taking over the business. One of them, by the family’s account, worked there so he could date the daughter. Another became, the winery says, Utah’s first professional woman winemaker. It calls itself the oldest and largest winery in southern Utah, and Visit Utah calls it the oldest on the Utah Wine Trail. By the winery’s count, southern Utah had no vineyards when it started and now has more than 60 acres.

I/G says it created the Utah Wine Festival and started the Utah Wine Trail. The trail’s website lists five member wineries, and Fields counted six. Visitors carry a pass that is punched at each tasting and can be turned in for a free gift once full. The trail’s site puts its vineyards at an average of 4,500 feet. At the 2026 festival’s Epicureans on the Edge picnic near Zion, rain fell while I/G and Zion Vineyards poured, according to one guest’s post.

I/G now has its own vineyard in Rockville, just outside the entrance to Zion National Park. There, by reservation, its sommeliers pour flights under a gazebo in the middle of the cabernet vines and serve charcuterie while they talk about how the grapes are grown.