IG Winery - Cedar City, UT Pt. 4

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 we continue our conversation with Doug McCombs of IG Winery now on our last episode, you touched on some festivals. Let's dive deeper into all of the festivals that you're offering this year. We are what we call popcorn and wine pairings, so we have a wine professional out of Salt Lake who comes down and does a really fun pairing of different flavored popcorns with different wines from around the state. They're all again. All the wines featured at the event are Utah-produced wines. Then we do a farm to fork dinner, which we go out to a local farm and they put a big long table out for about a hundred people served family-style, all kinds of fresh food right off the farm, and we pair it up with a lot of different Utah wines. We do something called Epicurean on the edge, which is only about 30 people. But you drive out to a remote mountain's edge, sort of looking into Zion National Park and they put out a huge spread there. And there's the local chef that does all this remote cooking, and he puts an amazing meal out for everybody and again, all paired with Utah wines. We have what we call the grand dinner on Center Street, and we put a table the length of the street. And again, we have some local chefs who put together some fabulous food. We do a picnic in the vineyard, there's a vineyard in St. George. We host about 50 people. They can walk out in the vineyard. We have some stations out there where we're pouring wine that was actually grown right there in the row. They're standing in and produced from the grapes they're looking at. And so it's kind of fun to say, you know, you're standing here in the Tempranillo, and if you look to your left or right, you'll see the grapes and this is what we produced back in 2018 or something like that, you know, that's a lot of fun. Now these events, what are the costs? Because I imagine they sell out pretty quickly.

Speaker2: They do. They usually sell out in about a month. We start sales in July on July 1st and usually by the end of the year. Toward the end of July, it's pretty much sold out. Tickets run anywhere from forty-five dollars to 120.00, depending on the event. Not only do you host these large events, but you host events like what I've got around my house with my wife and I have gone to many of them and there are paintings all over our walls at home, paint night. Yeah, we do a lot of paint nights during the winter when things are a little quieter. It's a good way to get people to come out and have some fun and enjoy some wine.

Looking back at all that you've created, what do you think was your biggest attribute of perseverance?

Yeah, this is our ten-year anniversary this year for IG Winery. The first two or three years were very tough. We just pushed through it and kept reinvesting in the business. We were not just building a business, we were building an industry where it never existed in the past. And so it just keeps pushing, keep pushing, be creative and how we market, just be as open and inviting as we possibly can with others who are looking to get into the business and encouraging and mentoring. And I try to do everything I can to put my arm around those who are going to ultimately become our competitors in an effort to really try to build our industry. And I think that's what works for us. Was there a point when that perseverance you could feel paid off and thought, OK, we've got something here? It was about the five-year mark when we moved out of the little space behind the B and B and moved into our current facility. We went up to almost 6000 square feet, and so all of a sudden we had lots of room to work and we had a beautiful tasting room and we had the equipment and all the things that, you know, make you feel like you've arrived. So I think that was our turning point. And then our sort of our confirmation was when we started the festival and began to see it sell out. We're a festival had never been done like this before, and we were seeing events selling out relatively quickly. We thought, OK, we've got something here. All right, Doug, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. Let's get all of your contact info and the best way to contact you. The best way is to go through our website at IGWinery.com. Our phone number there, if you want to call that phone number is 435.TOPWINE, Top WINE. IG Winery on Facebook and Instagram at IG Winery. We also have separate websites for the Utah Wine Festival. That's UtahWineFest.com That's where you can get tickets and more information about what we're offering event-wise. Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast 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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