Wilhelm Family Vineyards, Elgin AZ - Live Love Drink Travel

Today’s article is interesting for me. When we visited Wilhelm Family Vineyards in Elgin last year it was not our best experience. However as bloggers we have a goal of eventually covering every Arizona winery for Sippin’ September so here it goes.

Last year as we were planning our first Sippin’ September I was really looking forward to visiting a couple of the wineries. For some reason, a couple of them seemed to call to me and Wilhelm was one of them.

When you drive onto the vineyard you will see it is gorgeous. The estate vineyard is beautiful, and the building housing the tasting room is nice. It’s a well kept property.

As we walked into the tasting room Karyl Wilhelm was behind the counter. She greeted us and we sat down for a tasting. Karyl started out by telling us a little about the vineyard. She had a friend visiting who was also in the tasting room.

As she poured our first taste, she asked us where we were from. I said that we were from Phoenix. Then she asked if we lived in Phoenix itself or elsewhere in the valley. Taunya stated that we lived in Peoria, to which Karil replied. “Well you don’t live in Phoenix then do you.” This was the first of no less than three times that we were corrected or criticized, I kind of lost count.

During the tasting we like to ask a lot of questions, knowing that we need information to use in our articles. We tried to engage, but she seemed more interested in talking to her friend than talking to us or telling us about the wine.

When she poured the Patriot Salute she did talk briefly about both her and her husband Kevin being veterans, and about their support for the 390th Memorial Museum in Tucson. But she didn’t really give us much about the wine itself. From my experience when the winemaker is pouring they usually love to tell you about their wine.

If you have read my articles before, you are probably wondering why I didn’t start out by talking about the history of Wilhelm Family Vineyards like I would normally do. That’s primarily because we didn’t get a whole lot of information during our visit.

From doing research I did find out that both Karil and Kevin met during Desert Storm. Kevin describes Karil as self-taught, and she has a Winemaking Accreditation from U.C. Davis. They are proud supporters of the 390th Memorial Museum honoring the famous 390th bomb group who flew B-17’s during WWII. The Wilhelm’s make a donation for every sale of a bottle of Patriot Salute.

We did taste 5 of their reds. I generally like a good Arizona Sangiovese blend, yet the Kristians Kianti was not bad, but bit heavy on the cherry notes for my palate.

Of the five I probably liked the Rendezvous the best. The Syrah, Petite Syrah and Petit Verdot blend was definitely the most interesting featuring the smoky notes I generally like.

I briefly considered buying a bottle of the Patriot Salute purely for the donation. However by this time we were just ready to move on. I handed her my card, but it took close to 10 minutes for her to run my card because she was so engrossed in her conversation with her friend.

For this year’s Sippin’ September we wanted to try them again and get a more positive experience for this article. We had planned on visiting the Tucson tasting room. They were closed during our planning in July, but reopened on August 1st. Regrettably we did not plan appropriately enough and on the day we planned to visit they closed at 3 pm so we were unable to visit.

Our experience aside, I would never discourage anyone from visiting Wilhelm Family Vineyards when in Elgin, or any winery for that matter, based on just our encounter. You could easily have a different take away, and may enjoy their wines and we’d hate for anyone to miss out.

Be sure to check out tomorrow's article featuring Down Time Wines. You can read yesterday's article on RanchoMaria Vineyards, or see all of our Sippin’ September articles here.

Living, loving, drinking, and traveling through life.

— Derek