We ended our Verde Valley experience with the Burning Tree Cellars Tasting Room. Burning Tree specializes in small batch boutique wines. You won’t see their wines in a grocery store or anywhere else.  You can only purchase them in the tasting rooms or the vineyard. They offer single varietals and blends.

Burning Tree has a nice tasting room with plenty of space and the best outdoor seating in Old Town Cottonwood.  The tasting bar is a tad small in my opinion, but I find that to be fairly common. I think that when they started building tasting rooms they figured most folks would get a tasting, sit, and then go back up for the next tasting.  I find it to be more common that most folks hang out at the tasting bar.

The outdoor seating offers comfortable outdoor couches and chairs, some around a fire pit and some off to the side areas. They also have those angular glass tube patio heaters, which gives the venue a great look after dark but they don’t really use them in the summer.

We almost always visit Burning Tree Cellars because they do have nice wines, and again I like the tasting room.  This experience was less than great because the wines were just warm, getting close to the temp of a cooling cup of warm tea.  I find that this really takes the taste away from what you are trying to accomplish as a winemaker. I was just not enjoying it and I mentioned it to the tasting room gal and she said, ‘ya, I know, but we don’t have a cooler back here and we can’t walk back and forth to the storage room all the time’.  It felt very dismissive, but that is fine. I told them I couldn’t bring myself to purchase wine that I couldn’t get a true taste of. They were fine with that and so were we.

I find most of their wines to be on the lighter side and I do like something a bit more bold.  The Duke, which is a Cab Sav, Cab Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot blend is likely my favorite because it leans more in the direction of bold, but is still on the lighter side of bold.  I definitely would have purchased a bottle of this had I been able to get a true taste at the proper temperature. We have purchased The Bear in the past and enjoyed it as well. The Bear is a Syrah Grenache blend, but again on the lighter side of bold.  Per our usual we did not sample any whites.

Our biggest issue with the wine club here is that you get what you get. It’s winemaker’s choice, even if you do not enjoy a white, you still get them.  For us that is a waste of money. My biggest recommendation for them is to be more flexible with the wine club.

I would recommend you stop by here either first so that you can say you tried it, or last so you can say you tried it.  The patio can be pretty busy in good weather, especially after dark.  But it isn’t someplace we hang out at for too long.

If you have not already, check out yesterday's feature on the Southwest Wine Center, or check out all of our Sippin' September features here.

Living, loving, drinking, and traveling through life.

— Taunya

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