WOLTERBEEK, Continued on

Arizona’s wild grape can be found in most riparian areas

AWARDS

Best-in-Show: Red Wine Adult: Mulberry-Pomegranate Wine Best-in-Show: Porters Mesquite Port Best-in-Show: Ales Prickly Pear IPA Blue Ribbons Mulberry Vinegar Lemon Wine Pomegranate-mulberry Syrup

Pomegranates glow in the sun. Most backyard growers cannot keep up with the bountiful crop their tree produces each year and readily give Paul permission to harvest as many as he wants.

His friend Lacey Pacheco creates Wolterbeeks distinctive wine labels. Wolterbeek, Continued from page 1

Drive almost any street in Globe, he says, and you can find a tree loaded with bright red Granados during September and October. He is never shy about knocking on the front door and offering to harvest and haul away the unwanted fruit in exchange for a bottle of fresh-squeezed grade-A juice or a bottle of homemade wine.

Few people turn down his offer.

“People are happy to have their fruit taken and put to use and avoid having to clean up fallen fruit,” says Wolterbeek.

According to Wolterbeek, many of these are heritage plants or descendants of pomegranates planted generations ago by copper miners who brought saplings or cuttings from Mexico or other points of origin.

More than just delicious, he points out, pomegranates have quite a history in civilization, beginning with their origins in Persia (now known as Iran). There are so many biblical references to pomegranates, Wolterbeek explains, that bible scholars argue that pomegranates are more likely than an apple tree would have been in the Garden of Eden.

Wolterbeek learned his brewing/winemaking skills from Jack Holliday, a Globe native and “exceptional, self-taught brewer.”

The apprentice-turned-master, Wolterbeek, says that while it is easy to make wine, it is a challenge to make a bottle of truly good wine; one that’s balanced and nuanced and has a local terroir; the French term for flair unique to the place of origins where the fruit was grown and harvested.

He says after crushing a gallon of pomegranate juice, he leaves it at room temperature for a day or two, letting the native yeast gobble up the fruit sugar and convert it into alcohol and CO2.

If the process is not appropriately controlled and good sanitation maintained throughout, the natural wine can quickly progress to vinegar. Holliday helped to instill good habits in his apprentice over the years as the two made wine together. And sometimes, the two would blend their batches to create a tastier hybrid, such as Holliday’s famous blackberry-mulberry blend that Wolterbeek says was Jack’s “house wine.”

Wolterbeeks “Best of Show” wine was a pomegranatemulberry blend he describes as his own “house fine wine”, and his overall favorite, made of a 2:1 blend of mulberry wine with pomegranate wine.

Wolterbeek says you might be surprised at how many fruits grow in the local area, including mulberry, pomegranate, plum, and cherry. Grapes like Red Flame, Thompson’s Seedless and Concord, thrive in this climate, he says, and are common in neighborhoods throughout Globe and Miami. And Arizona even has a native wild grape known as Canyon Grape which can be found along any riparian canyon or wash below the Pinals.

Grape wines improve with age and conditioning, he notes and says he is already working on his wines for next year’s Fair. u