I was asked recently, over a glass of Arizona red at a tasting room in downtown Cottonwood, how my wine story began. It came from a friend who spent years deep in the community college’s wine program there, the kind of question only someone who actually knows wine might think to ask.

I didn’t have a clear answer. I turned the glass in my hand for a second, half expecting one clean memory to surface. But instead a series of memories came to mind – three moments, scattered across twenty-some years, none of which had ever felt like the beginning of anything at the time.

So where did my wine journey actually start?

The First Root: Rebecca
I was maybe twelve when my mom became friends with Rebecca. She was a musician, writer, editor, a connoisseur of life, and for a brief while she stayed with us. She always remembered me as the kid who read a book while walking home from school. I liked that. While staying with us, I remember how every evening she’d settle in with one hand wrapped around a cigarette and the other, a tall glass of red wine, usually with a book somewhere nearby — reading one, or writing one, I never knew which.

I don’t know if I paid much attention at the time. It might just be one of those idyllic childhood images that only becomes meaningful in retrospect. Evening light, the smell of smoke, the particular stillness of an adult absorbed and satisfied in her own world. I didn’t connect her to my own wine habit until around 2012, when I started thinking about wine as a whole thing, a thing worth paying attention to. By then Rebecca had settled in Payson (after a stint in the Yukon, making her own wine, among other adventures), and in her final years Brent and I got to spend time with her there. At least a couple years of great red wine, guitar, and good stories shared on her patio. I still think about Rebecca parties often, where she encouraged me to create my own lyrics and play my own songs rather than sing someone else’s. I still try and recreate those nights – the homemade bread, blanched vegetables and fish. We got to be part of her final days, both intellectually and, in small physical ways, around her place. She passed away from cancer. There’s something in that image, wine as a companion to a certain kind of solitary, creative evening — that I think I was quietly filing away long before I knew what to do with it.

The Second Root: The Sisterhood
After finishing my master’s degree in Colorado, I came home. I missed my desert heat. My cactus. I soon landed a job with Aliza Sherman, the woman who literally wrote Social Media for Dummies, doing social media for her client, the Wine Sisterhood, across a handful of brands: Cowgirl Sisterhood, Purple Cowboy, and eventually Whiskey Sister.

At the time I still had horses. I grew up with horses and the cowgirl identity wasn’t a persona, it was just how I grew up. So the alignment was natural. But the actual work of it, writing about wine, thinking about how to talk about it, Pinterest about it, blog about it, paying attention to what made one bottle shared amongst women worth talking about, is where my palate actually started to develop. The more I experimented for work, the more I noticed. And the more I noticed, the more intrigued I became by the stories of the wines, and naturally the more expensive my taste got.

It was coincidentally also during this time that the Wine Sisterhood partnered with the Outlander series, just starting out at the time, and I vaguely remember a taste and Twitter party at Aliza’s and paying little to no attention to Outlander. I was there to assist and had little interest in Outlander (heaven knows why). Ironically some ten years later I would watch my first full episode of Outlander, become hooked and end up on my own Outlander quest leading to not only meeting Jamie Fraiser (i.e. Sam Heughan) in real life, but Diana Gabaldon, the orchestrator of it all, herself at an event in Flagstaff in in 2026.

The Third Root: Arizona Wine
My older brother got me into the band Tool when I was a kid. It was a way for us to connect, perhaps, but something in the vibration, rhythm, and timing of their music moved something in me. It coincided with my love of industrial music, begun sometime after high school graduation and refined in my early college years, amongst trips to Tucson with my friend Gaby and parties at Colorado State. Years later, I found out that Maynard James Keenan — Tool’s lead singer — had left LA, started a winery in Arizona, and become one of the state’s loudest advocates for its wine. That felt like too strange a coincidence to ignore.

Kent took me to my first Tool concert at Fiddler’s Green in Denver while I was studying at CSU, and I clearly remember sitting on the grass, watching Maynard’s contortions and magical voice from a distance, the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop, thinking it was the most magical night ever. Years later, Kent took me again — this time to Maynard’s Cinquanta celebration, his 50th birthday tour, for the best Puscifer concert of my life. We connect over the technicality of the music, the ties to the vastness of Arizona, and the raw skill of someone so pure, so true in his musical talent and effort.

I remember driving up to Jerome with my mom to visit his tasting room and try his famous Arizona wine for the first time. It was love at first taste. I could taste the earth in it. He drew out the leather, pepper, cigar, and Arizona earth and I swear I could almost taste the band within the wine. The mother-daughter trip alone was one to remember; we stayed in the historic Connor Hotel above Caduceus Cellars. Something about that trip made Arizona wine feel like mine in a way nothing else had. It wasn’t inherited from Napa or Bordeaux — it came out of the same ground I grew up in, and it tasted like it. Like home, with an earthy wildness to it that drew me in.

Three Threads, One Story
My wine adventures have since taken me to the wine regions of Spain during the Camino de Santiago, where I drank the local wines each night after the daily hike, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon where we lived briefly and I had a membership at at least two wineries, my early white German wine tastings during my study abroad in Germany, and to the Washington wine region when we lived in Seattle. I made my first wines during Covid and briefly while living in Oregon – successfully! I might add.

Rebecca gave me the image before I knew I wanted it. The Wine Sisterhood gave me the vocabulary. Jerome gave me a reason to call it mine. I sold my last horse three years ago, and the cowgirl in me may have gone somewhat quiet, but wine stayed. Maybe that’s the real answer — not one origin story, but three small ones that converged on the same glass: bold, mineral, leather, earth, deep dark berries. Still looking for that taste. Still finding it.

(photo of the wine fountain on the Camino de Santiago)