IG Winery, Cedar City, UT Pt. 1

Welcome, welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host, Forrest Kelly, from the seed to the glass wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, great minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is in this episode. We head to the state with the first-ever Kentucky Fried Chicken. No, it's not Kentucky. It's the only state where every county contains some part of a national forest. It's the second driest state in the United States. Almost three hundred sunshine days a year, and its residents are the most charitable people in the country. They rank first in volunteer rates. My name is Doug McCombs. I am the owner and winemaker for IG Winery in Cedar City, Utah. I'm also winemaker and operations manager for Schneller Winery and Schneller Vineyards. IG Winery is located in Cedar City, Utah, which is in southern Utah. It's about one hundred seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas and two hundred fifty miles south of Salt Lake City. So mentally, now that we have a picture of where you're located, can you tell us a little bit about Doug? Where did Doug grow up? I grew up initially in Minneapolis, moved to Las Vegas in 1985 and I got involved in the hotel business as an HR guy, kind of an entry-level HR job and then worked my way up in 35 years to the senior HR positions at different properties up and down the Las Vegas Strip. It was because of that I think that I was exposed and then got interested. Did that interest come from your schooling, what you went to college for, or just natural curiosity? Yeah, natural curiosity. I went to school for political science. Of all things was exposed to the world of wine through food and beverage directors and through brokers who came in to pitch their products. And I began to get really curious about what all the excitement was about and then had a buddy who took me out to Napa a few times and just kind of got hooked on the world of wine. But really, from a consumption standpoint. So you're a political science major living in Las Vegas, working in the hospitality field, and you've got a friend that takes you to all the wineries in Napa. Then you get the idea to maybe delve deeper into this wine industry thing. Yep. Once I got the bug and decided I wanted to open a winery, I planted a little vineyard in my yard in Las Vegas and I built a winery in the backyard where I could make lots and lots of bad wine and figure out what I was doing wrong. So eventually then worked with some real wineries up in Washington state kind of decided I was going to do it myself. My wife and I looked around for properties in Napa, Sonoma, even Washington, but just that was the big pond. We were little fish, so we decided to go to Utah because Utah has about 5 million annual visitors, probably more than that now. To all the parks and things. And so there were no wineries, none in the southern end of the state. So we decided it was close to home and a tourist market ripe for picking. And that's exactly what we did. Yeah, very smart idea. Looking at the recent statistics going to travel.Utah.Gov Utah welcomed almost 17 million visitors in 2020. IG Winery, my winery does not own any land. We buy our grapes from others on the IG side of it. I don't have to be in the farming business, right? I can buy the product I need, and somebody else has to worry about those dry summers and the heat and the early frosts and all the kind of things that get you in the farming world. Let me go back for just a second. IG Winery, I forgot to ask you, how did that come about the name? Well, originally it was Iron Gate Winery because we were located behind the Iron Gate Bed and breakfast in Cedar City very early. Like 2000 middle of 2012, we got a letter from some winery in New Zealand that told us they had the rights to Iron Gate in the U.S. and so being a new upstart company with no money, we didn't want to pick a fight. So we just dropped Iron Gate and became IG. And then a few years after that, we trademarked the name Instant Gratification IG. So this is before Instagram, right? Right. You could actually kind of turn the tables on somebody else. Great. Well, you know, now that Instagram is so popular and it's getting referred to as IG, more and more frequently, we just kind of smile and go along with it. Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of The Best 5 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.