Board member Amy Heisler spoke with Eric Glomski, founder and winemaker of Page Springs Cellars.
Transcript
Amy Heisler: Hi, I’m Amy Heisler, Director of Internal Communications at First Citizens Bank and a proud board member of Friends of Public Radio Arizona. And welcome to this interview with a pioneer of winemaking in the Verde Valley and Arizona, Eric Glomski, founder and winemaker of Page Springs Cellars. Hey, Eric. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.
Eric Glomski: Thanks for having me.
Amy Heisler: So, Page Springs. Oh, wonderful. Just happy to have you here because we’re going to talk in a little bit about how busy you are at the moment. So, just want to show our appreciation for that. Page Springs will be one of our featured wineries at the 2027 First Press Fine Wine Festival, which will be held at the Musical Instrument Museum on February 20th. And the event is returning to this wonderful venue for a second year. And we are excited to welcome our public radio supporters to another fantastic day of meeting winemakers, trying their offerings, and enjoying live music. And today, we are going to learn more about Eric’s winemaking story, how this year’s harvest is shaping up, and what we can look forward to from Page Springs at the First Press Fine Wine Festival.
So, turning to you, Eric. I personally have been a fan of you and your wines for a really long time. So, thank you for all your work. We, I really enjoy it.
Eric Glomski: Thank you.
Amy Heisler: Yeah, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. Thank you. For those tuning in that may be new to the Arizona wine scene, can you please take a moment to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your winery?
Eric Glomski: Sure. Eric Glomski. I live and, more or less, live in Page Springs, not to be confused with Page. So, we’re actually in an unincorporated area called Cornville. We’re basically on the south side of Sedona, north side of Cottonwood, in the Verde Valley. But I also go between here and my second home outside of Portal, Arizona, in the Chiricahua Mountains, where we have another vineyard called Colibri, which is Spanish for hummingbird. That vineyard’s namesake is the highest hummingbird diversity in North America is in those mountains.
Anyway, we’ve been around, we opened our doors in 2004. We are a completely—I guess what business people would call—a vertically integrated business. We farm our own grapes—the majority of them, we buy a little bit—we make it into wine right here at our winery in Page Springs. We cellar it, age it, bottle it, and sell the majority of it right here at our winery. We do sell a little bit through our distributor and partner, Quail Distributing, who’s down in Phoenix. So, gets us into places like Total Wine, Albertson’s, Safeway, BevMo, and a handful of really great restaurants, places like Pretty Penny and The Roosevelt, etc.
Anyway, we also have our own bistro restaurant at the winery. We have excellent food that’s all kind of crafted to pair with our wines. And we also have a tour program, so you can come up here and do winery tours. And we have a collaborative project with a good friend of mine from Tucson, where we have Arizona and the Southwest’s only—and actually one of the few—corkscrew museums in the United States. So, we have all kinds of cool things for people to check out up here.
Amy Heisler: So, let’s talk a little bit more about the Verde Valley, which is one of three main grape-growing areas in the state of Arizona. But what inspired you and your family to plant vines and start your business in the Verde Valley? And you know, maybe talk about what was the wine scene there when you started, because I know you were an early adopter up there, and then what does it look like now?
Eric Glomski: Well, you know, I was actually born in the Chicago area, raised in Boston. And I came out to Arizona to go to college. I went to Prescott College in Prescott, and then I did some grad work at NAU before I left to go to California to learn winemaking. And really my previous life was as focused on river ecology and restoration. I used to have a business restoring forests along rivers, and I taught at Prescott College. That’s really what led me to winemaking, because I spent so much time along rivers. And a lot of the early Anglo and Hispanic settlement was along rivers because there was water there. And not everybody privatized their land, and when I did contracts for state or federal agencies, I often found old homesteads that were abandoned. And I started making wines out of apples because there were almost always heirloom apples on those homesteads—apples, quinces, and pears, usually—and every now and then an apricot or two and some peaches.
But I connected with a mentor in Prescott—who, in fact, I hung out with him yesterday, he’s 95 now—and he lived off the grid in the Sierra Anchas near Lake Roosevelt 40, 50 years ago, and he was making apple wines. And I said, “Hey, there’s all these really cool heirloom apples.” He said, “Well, you know, get some over here, and I’ll show you how to make wine.” And so, that was really my first foray into that world.
And really the epiphanous moment was when we made these apple wines. The first apple wine came from this really interesting apple that kind of looked like a Red Delicious, but it wasn’t mealy like a Red Delicious; it was really crisp, like a McIntosh. And McIntoshes were what I grew up with in New England.
Amy Heisler: And my favorite. Yeah.
Eric Glomski: Yeah, I backpacked out like—and I was young at the time—I backpacked out like 80 pounds of those in my big expedition pack. We made this wine. Eight months later, I smelled it and tasted it, and it reminded me exactly of the place where I picked those apples. And so, it was the first time I realized as a scientist—because really my previous life was all about science—that these apples, these wines, were these kind of conduits for places. They were artistic expressions of landscapes.
And when you look, as I broadened my horizons, I realized there’s lots of things like that out there. You know, when you taste a great peach, or you have a great steak and they say it came from this place, or you go to Europe and they say, “Here’s the cheeses from these mountains,” or even the French winemakers will say, “Here, try our spring cheese versus our fall cheese because different plants are growing at the time the cows eat them, the milk’s different, and thus the cheese is different.”
So, that’s been kind of my passion for the last 30 years. In fact, this is my 30th vintage professionally as a winemaker. And I’ve been on kind of a quest to grow grapes and make wines that express this landscape, this wild, beautiful landscape we call Arizona.
And I actually dropped out of grad school because I got a job at a winery in California, because that became my passion that overrode my previous passion of rivers, which is still very dear to me. And I briefly worked in Sonoma, and then I took a job at a winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains between Santa Cruz and San Jose, making Pinot Noir and Chardonnay mainly. So, I jumped right into the advanced courses, because Pinot Noir especially is a very fickle and difficult grape to make great wine from.
But I always planned on coming back to Arizona. I was at a conference in Sacramento—the biggest wine conference of the year for our industry happens in Sacramento every January roughly, it’s called the Unified Symposium. And lo and behold, there was an Arizona table there, and I met a guy who was informally there, and his name is John Marcus. John Marcus planted the first vineyard in northern Arizona in the Verde Valley post-Prohibition. And there was one other guy prior to Prohibition named Henry Sherman, which is a whole another really fascinating story. He was a German immigrant, was shut down by Prohibition, and never recovered and died soon thereafter.
So, this industry laid dormant until John Marcus came along. John was actually a fascinating guy. He was one of Dr. Kevorkian’s attorneys, and he was also a linebacker for Michigan State. So, he was a huge guy, was this really creative, boisterous, big attorney guy, right? And but he grew up in a farming family in Michigan, and he planted a vineyard. And we met, and he said, “Well, you know, I grew some grapes, but I don’t really know how to make wine.” I said, “Gosh, I’m really trying to figure out how to get back to Arizona.”
And so, I was a single father at the time, had two sons, and I relocated my two sons and I, and we moved to Echo Canyon Winery, which was John’s, which is just upstream from where I am now. In fact, it’s right just slightly downstream from where John McCain lived for years, and Cindy McCain still has a place. And I was at John’s place, met my current wife of 25 years, who is a single mother as well. So, we fused our two families—her two daughters, my two sons—kind of a mini Brady Bunch.
And then, gosh, I remember researching this section of Oak Creek, because the McCains and John Marcus are both on Oak Creek downstream from Sedona. And I did this research years ago, and I remember being in this spot where I am now, thinking it was the most beautiful spot of all of Arizona. And here I am at John Marcus’, I’m like, “Oh my god, there’s that little stretch of river, and look, there’s a for sale sign on it.”
And it wasn’t easy, and I didn’t really have much money. But we pulled it off, and thus the family business. My stepfather, mother, brother, and birth father all kicked in a little money. I owned a small home in Prescott that I sold, and we bought this property outright, and then we borrowed against it to build the winery. That was 2003, and then we planted our first vines in 2004. So, there’s the CliffsNotes version of the last 24 years of my life.
Amy Heisler: That’s amazing! Oh my gosh, I enjoyed that story so much. And of all the surprises that you’ve laid on us today, as a Michigan State grad myself, I was not expecting, like, a little Spartan connection to your story. Super fun.
Eric Glomski: Yeah, right?
Amy Heisler: But my goodness, what a journey! What a journey that you’ve been on. And so speaking of the winery and the making of the wines, and you started in 2004. And full disclosure to our audience, we are recording this interview right in the middle of your harvest season, which is a little earlier this year. You came in for us today, so thank you for your support of First Press Fine Wine Festival, that you would take a moment to come in and have this conversation.
Um, but how is—talk to us about harvest. How’s harvest shaping up for you this year? We just mentioned that it was a month early, but what’s it looking like?
Eric Glomski: Yeah, you know, every harvest is unique, and to me, one of the many beauties of winemaking is the fact that it’s vintage-driven. So, most people don’t understand when you see a date on a bottle of wine, that’s the birth date of that wine. Okay? And that is—and our laws, and most wine laws internationally, tie vintage or a date with a place. For instance, in US wine law, you can’t say a vintage without a place, and you can’t say a place without a vintage. Most people don’t know that. Why? Because a named place is very important. And to say a vintage, our laws and our industry recognize that 2026 in Arizona is different than 2026 in California. 2026 in the Verde Valley is different than the region of Sonoita in southeastern Arizona or Willcox, for instance—our three AVAs, American Viticultural Areas.
So, why? Because the climate, the daily temperatures, the nighttime temperatures, the rainfall in that area—how cloudy was it? Were there fires in the area? Was there a frost? Was it, you know… So, what is a vintage? A vintage is a little stamp that says, “Here’s everything that went on in this place on the planet during this year.” And that’s why they’re all different.
So, this year, I would say this was marked by a beautiful spring. We were like, “Oh my god, this is the perfect spring shaping up to be a great vintage.” It was mild. We didn’t get a ton of heat. In fact, we even pushed into early summer, and it wasn’t super hot. And generally, our milder years are our better vintages.
But then it got super hot, super hot. And meanwhile, there was a big prediction for this extraordinary El Niño and monsoon season. So, we were kind of bracing for that. And there’s things that you do in the vineyard to get ready for having a bunch of rain, because rain means fungal pressure, mold, mildew, all kinds of things. So, what do you do? You pull your leaves and you open up your canopies, and you make sure sun can get in there and air can dry out your grapes after rains.
Well, then all of a sudden, it’s up here, it’s 110 for three or four weeks. Well, then you get sunburn on your berries, and you start to get dehydration, and you go, “Oh, I opened this up because I was expecting rain, and now it’s super hot.” Oh, but guess what? The rains are coming; they’re just coming later than usual.
So, you know, people think of Arizona, and the classic question is, “Why do you grow grapes there? It’s too dry and hot.” Well, the funniest thing is my two biggest problems are cold and spring frost and wetness in the season, because we’re growing at higher elevations where it’s cooler, number one, relatively speaking. And we have this additional challenge where we’re trying to straddle and balance the risk of this heat and this rain alongside one another, and the practices that you employ.
So, for heat, you want more canopy. You want shading. You want to grow the top of your grape canopy to act like an umbrella to shade those grapes, but you want to open it up so that if you get a lot of rain, it’ll still dry out, you know So, there’s this fine line between heat and monsoon that is really difficult. And I’ll be honest, some things I nailed this year, some things I completely botched, some things I opened up too much and I got a lot of sunburn and some shriveled up raisins—not everything, because the grapes, some of them are still tucked in there.
In other ones, I didn’t open it up as much. Like for instance, we don’t open up the canopy on whites as much, because white grapes, if they see a lot of sun, they turn a more golden color, and it doesn’t allow you to make a light, fruity, crisp wine, which is what we like to do stylistically. So, we don’t open those up. Next thing you know, it rains for 2 weeks, and then I’ve got problems with fungus or mold, you know.
So, it’s been a—you know, every vintage is a bell curve. You almost always make some wines that aren’t that great, you make a bunch of good wines, and then make a few… The best vintages are the ones where the bell curve shifts towards the really great stuff, and that’s all about climate. The last great, great year that I can remember that just got handed to us on a platter was 2014, 12 years ago. We’ve had—and that would be like an A+ vintage. We’ve had a few A’s, and we’ve had a bunch of B’s and B+s, we’ve had a couple C’s.
So, you know, I would say this—I mean, this year’s not over, but I’d probably give this year a B, B+ average. We’re going to make some stupendous wines for certain grape varieties that do well in the conditions that were given us this year, and then we have some ones that really didn’t do well, and then we have a bunch that did pretty darn well, you know. So, that’s where we’re at right now.
And the biggest thing is that it was a really early vintage. When I planted our first vineyards, our first picks were usually around September 7th. Well, our per—you know, call it climate change, global warming, the roll of the dice, whatever you want to call it—we started August 3rd this year, more than a month earlier than we did when I opened up this business.
Amy Heisler: Wow!
Eric Glomski: And last year was our earliest vintage on date. We started around the 14th of August, and then this year was the third. So, you know, I suppose at some point we’ll be picking in July, who knows? And we’ll just have to keep adapting our cultural practices to deal with these warmer summers that we’re getting and later rains, and sometimes no rain at all. So, we’ll see. You get very close to your climate and your landscape when you grow something like grapes, for instance.
Amy Heisler: Yeah, absolutely. And I think as consumers, sometimes you go pick up a bottle of wine, a lot of people, I’m assuming, don’t think of it as an agricultural product. Like, they see their produce or other things, but ultimately, this is—it’s farming. It’s an agricultural product, and there’s like all the production that gets to that.
Eric Glomski: So, in addition, I call myself—when you ask my title, I call myself a wine grower, not a winemaker. Go ahead.
Amy Heisler: Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no, that was—that’s great. So, we talked about some of the pieces of harvest that can have an impact on that final product, but what are some of the decision points during the production? You’ve picked your grapes, you’ve chosen the best ones. What are some steps in the production process from the grape to the glass that can really make a big difference in the end product?
Eric Glomski: Our job is to steward these grapes to the winery and let them become something. We guide them in ways where we don’t overly manipulate or overly impose our perceptions about what it should be. Only I want you to see what this place has to say.
I grow Syrah, for instance, in four different vineyards, and I buy a little bit of Syrah from other places. And each of that—it’s the same grape, but each of those wines are completely different. Why? Because of the ecology of each of those sites, right?
So, when we bring it in, if the grapes come in perfect, our job is very simple: do as little as possible, let that grape become wine, and then enjoy it with people, share it with people. It’s the grapes that are beat up or challenged or bird-pecked or have fungal issues or got sunburn, that’s when winemaking prowess kind of comes into play. That’s when all of these technical things that you learn—these tricks and these techniques that you’ve learned in the last three decades—get employed.
So, I think winemaking prowess comes into play in lousy vintages and with grapes that are not ideal. And then if the wine grower, the grape grower did a good job, our job is simple. So, we bring them in, we pick them.
Number one, the most important winemaking decision that gets made every year is when you pick the grape, okay? I always use other things as metaphors. A peach is the perfect metaphor for perfect ripeness. If you pick a peach too early, it’s crunchy and green. If you pick it too late, it’s squishy and a mess. Somewhere in between is this perfect peach, where it still has some freshness and acidity, but it still drips down your face, and it’s that perfect texture and it’s just delicious, right? So, our job is to pick the grape at the perfect ripeness based on what we’re trying to accomplish artistically. And there’s a wide swath there; different people have different styles, and that’s the beauty of it.
And then we bring it in. And if it’s a white grape, it gets pressed and fermented as juice usually. And if it’s a red grape, it gets destemmed and it gets fermented on its skins. Everything wonderful about a red wine comes from the skins the majority of the time, sometimes a few stems too. Red wines get fermented in open-top bins on the skins. We let them get warm; the warmth helps extract color from the skins. White wines, the juice gets fermented in cold stainless steel tanks largely, sometimes barrels. We keep it cold, hold on to all the aromatics, esters, volatile oils. And a red fermentation might take a week; a white fermentation might take a month.
And then eventually they settle down. They either get aged in stainless steel or barrels, depending on the wine, for anywhere from six to 30 months. We watch them and we taste and we get to know them. And then we may have had an idea about their destiny early on; sometimes that holds true, sometimes it doesn’t. Then you just adapt.
Amy Heisler: Adapt, yeah.
Eric Glomski: Yeah. And one of the most artistic processes associated with winemaking is blending. Again, you can play a note on a guitar; you play two notes or three, now you have a melody, right? And you can create a rhythm. We can have single-varietal wines that are just, oh, bam, this Syrah was perfect, put it in a bottle, we’re done. But maybe we want to combine a few things because we want a little more of a symphony. We think it’ll have a little more breadth and depth and complexity, but we still want harmony, you know? A bunch of music played together discordantly isn’t a great thing. But if you can harmonize them, and all of a sudden, like when you hear a bunch of people chanting together, and all of a sudden all those voices gather together and you can feel that depth and that resonance and that expansion—same thing with wines.
So, like I said, eventually we blend them, we put them in a bottle, we age them for a while more in bottle. And if a tree falls in the forest, what good is it? Really, what we do is we make wine to share with people and make people happy and, within reason, break down their barriers. A little bit of alcohol, I think, can be a great thing, especially one that has a lot of cultural underpinnings, which wine does. And I think it helps people open up, it helps create interpersonal connectivity, it helps maybe create a little teeny little bit of vulnerability, which I think can be valuable in this world. There’s a lot of long-standing cultural depth to the enjoyment of a bottle of wine with friends, and the ritual associated with it.
There you go. I know I’m talking too much, I’m sorry.
Amy Heisler: 100%. No, no, that’s great. You’re speaking my language, and you’re speaking the language of people tuning into this, so that’s great.
Are you up for a lightning round? We’ve heard so much about the process and line, but let’s learn a little bit about you. So, first question: Do you have a favorite underrated wine?
Eric Glomski: Two of them. Can I do two? Greek island white wines. I love the white wines of the Greek islands, especially Santorini and Paros. Check them out, they’re amazing. They taste like you’re drinking the Mediterranean Ocean, it’s so cool.
And then I would say my second one would be Cru or Grand Cru Beaujolais. Most people only know Beaujolais from this inexpensive, fruity wine that shows up with flowery labels around Thanksgiving, which is a great wine, but little known—and that’s made from a grape called Gamay. Little known are the Grand Cru Gamay from this region called Beaujolais, which is southern Burgundy, north of the Rhône, that are just these spicy, complex, super interesting, very terroir or ecologically-driven wines. I love them, and their values—I mean, comparable wines in Burgundy could be hundreds of dollars, and you can pick these up for $20, $30, $40, and they’re so good and just taste so much like that place.
Amy Heisler: Excellent, refreshing. Biggest influence or inspiration in your winemaking journey?
Eric Glomski: A person, or an event, or anything?
Amy Heisler: Any, Any.
Eric Glomski: I think the guy I told you about earlier, Dick Landis, 95 years old.
Amy Heisler: Oh, Dick.
Eric Glomski: He’s an amazing artist. I mean, he was the first guy. He’s also an artist; his art is in the Smithsonian, for instance, and he’s just this undiscovered, brilliant guy who does weavings. He does weavings with the finest thread; they’re so fine that you can’t tell that they’re woven. They look like paintings or pictures. Look him up, Richard Landis, sometimes.
And he actually knows how to weave in a way where we can get three-dimensional images from his weaving. He’s 95 now; he hasn’t woven in some time. But at the peak of his career, he produced some of the most amazing art I’ve ever seen, and he never was interested in being famous. He just traded art with his friends and has a priceless collection of art from other famous artists. He’s from an amazing era. So, he’s 95 now. Dick Landis, Prescott, Arizona.
Amy Heisler: Let’s turn to First Press Fine Wine Festival. We love having you at the event, and could you just share a little bit about why it’s important for you to participate and support the event?
Eric Glomski: Well, you know, we’ve been involved on and off with First Press since the very first year it happened. And I haven’t slept in days, and I’ve been working long, long days, but I’m 99% sure that was at the Museum of Modern Art in Phoenix the first time, and it was there for a number of years, and it’s moved around a little bit.
And I love the MIM. I hope I can make it to this one, because I go to the MIM for concerts all the time. We’re members there. If anybody listening has never been to the MIM, what a treasure for Arizona! And then the fact that First Press is happening there is so cool.
In a day and age—and here we are on Zoom—of mass media and everything moving so fast, I’m a huge fan of radio. I drive a lot because my vineyards are in southeastern Arizona, so I’m constantly listening to radio, I’m listening to podcasts, I’m listening to audiobooks. Right now, I’m relistening to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and if you’ve never read or listened to that book, it’s like an environmental Bible. Some of it’s controversial, but it’s amazing.
Anyway, I think one of the great things about radio is that it still allows you to use your mind visually. It’s like, wait a minute, you’re just listening to sounds, but it allows you to form images and create your own visual narrative as you’re listening to stuff on the radio. And I still really love that. In a lot of ways, that’s being lost.
I remember listening to public radio when I was a kid. We’d sit around and listen to Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion or a number of early NPR shows, and it was an amazing thing because you played out this whole movie in your head, right? And I would hate to lose that.
And obviously, then there’s just the whole public support side of this, where big business—with all due respect to big businesses out there—aren’t dictating it. It’s not just about money; it’s about people and programming, local voices, and a different set of values. I feel like this is still a repository and a stronghold for values that, in a lot of ways, are kind of being lost in our world. So, we’re always going to support public radio, and I just hope it can hold on through time.
Amy Heisler: Wonderful! Well, that was an amazing close. I’m just going to leave it there, because that kind of encapsulates everything that I love about public radio, that our supporters love about public radio. So, thank you for putting it so well.
And thank you for joining us today on a super, very busy day for you with harvest. So again, that just speaks to the support that you have of public radio and the First Press Fine Wine Festival. And so I hope those out there listening will please pop in and see us on February 20th at the Musical Instrument Museum. And for more information, please look up more information at fpraz.org/events, and then follow all of our social handles to see what other wineries are going to be there and details. And at some point, we’ll also have a place to buy tickets.
So, we hope to see everybody there to join Page Springs, and hopefully Eric can find a way to get down there to join us. But otherwise, he will have some amazing people from his staff there in support of KJZZ, KBACH, Sun Sounds of Arizona, and SPOT 127 Youth Media Center. So, Eric, thank you again so much for joining us today.
Eric Glomski: Yeah, I can’t wait to see you all down there, and hopefully I’ll see you there, too, if I make it.