IG Winery - Cedar City, UT Pt. 3

Welcome, welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly, from the seed to the glass wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is in our last conversation, Doug. We ran out of time, so you couldn't explain Cocktail Lounge. What's that about it at IG Winery? The history on that was that we have a lot of locals who come in and do tastings, and they began coming in and saying, Look, you know, I've done plenty of tastings. Can I just have a glass of wine and sit and enjoy the tasting room and hang out with my friends? And of course, under Utah law, we can't just pour a glass of wine as a winery. However, if we acquired a bar license, we could pour you a glass of our wine and let you sit and enjoy it. So we did that. We went out and got the bar license. And but under Utah law, if you have a bar license, you have to also pour some cocktails under that license agreement. So we made up a few cocktails. And so from five p.m. to 10 p.m., you can come in if you don't want to do a tasting, you can come in and have a nice handcrafted cocktail or a glass of wine and enjoy the winery that way. Yes, looking at your menu, I see your handcrafted cocktails, your Maple Manhattan, The Arrogant Bastard, The Starter Wife, Caitie's Hard Iced Tea, Sweet Apple Spice, the IG-Tini, the wine tasting experience. Can you explain that? Well, we will do a tasting. We typically do five different wines as part of your tasting. If you're the type that likes to sit and have an explanation, we like to walk everyone through an explanation of each wine where it's from, how we made it, what the unique taste you know, components are of that particular wine and just, you know, take our time. So a tasting could take about an hour. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person that really just wants to have your wine and be left alone, it can go a lot quicker than that. So you moved into your new facility and you've got the cocktail lounge. And who's designing that you? I did. Yes, you did. All right. Yeah, yeah, it's been good. We used a lot of the old building materials that were there before we remodeled the building, so we gave it kind of a rustic-chic feel. It's a very inviting place and people enjoy the vibe a lot. I can tell just from our short conversation that you're very ambitious. You've started this winery with no previous winery experience and now you've moved into a brand new, beautiful facility. You've designed this cocktail lounge. I've got a feeling that you've got your fingers in something else as well. And then we just recently created the Utah Wine Trail, which will open in the spring of this year. And that'll be you've seen. I know these trails around, you know, different states where you, you follow the map and go to each one and get your card punched or something like that. And when you visited all the wineries, you get a little gift, and it's obviously designed to encourage everybody to get out, hit all the different wineries. And so we're starting that this year as well. So we're excited to see the growth and what the future has. Quite a little wine legacy here in Utah. Well, we're trying. That was our goal when we started out and think, thank heaven. We've seen some success with that, you know, to that point when we started. As I told you, we were the only ones in town as of today. Now there are six wineries in southern Utah that have grown up since we started this 10 years ago. So we've been kind of the trailblazer, if you will, for everybody else who's come along afterward, and that's by design. We wanted to see this area become a tourist. You know, wine begin to be able to promote wine tourism. So there have been several additional vineyards planted now. And like I said, six wineries are now open in the southern Utah area. We being IG Winery, in this case, have created something called the Utah Wine Festival. And so each year on Labor Day weekend, we host the festivals and it, you know, it's it goes through the month of August with different events around the state. And then it culminates on Labor Day weekend with a bunch of farm to fork style dinners and remote dinners and just lots of food and wine that really isn't intended to introduce people to all the different Utah wine producers Also want to remind you that we are Amazon friendly now. You can ask Alexa, "Play Best Wine Podcast" and see what happens. "Play Best Wine Podcast." Thank you for listening, I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of the Best Five Minute Wine Podcast. This was produced by IHYSM if you like the show, please tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.

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