Owner Jack Sanders poses with his dog Charlie, a 6-year-old terrier mix, at the Sanders Family Winery in Pahrump, Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022.
Wednesday, March 2, 2022 | 2 a.m.
PAHRUMP — Jack Sanders watched as a herd of wild mustangs devoured the first wine grapes grown at his Nevada winery on this day in 1998.
He was quickly faced with a harsh reality: How would his new business — the first winery in the state, he said — survive a year without the grapes to power it?
But the mustangs eventually finished their snack, and Sanders adjusted quickly, growing more grapes and launching the winery. More than 30 years later, he said he was still adapting to the latest changes in the industry.
The newest challenge? Exploding shipping costs and glass bottle shortages that have forced an increase in his prices at the Sanders Family Winery.
It’s a Tuscan-inspired winery with 10 wines made from petite syrah and zinfandel grapes in the surrounding vineyard, as well as fruit from Santa Barbara County in California. He sold Pahrump Valley Winery, his initial project, in 2004.
Minute as it is, the Southern Nevada wine industry is no stranger to inflation woes around the United States. As gas prices increase, so do the shipping costs for the bottles and the grapes used in the wine-making process. They are shipped from California to Pahrump every few months, Sanders said, and on his last order, shipping prices had quadrupled.
Glass items themselves saw a sharp increase in price — about a third higher than usual, Sanders said — as a combined result of gas prices increasing and supply chain blockages that were first reported around the holidays.
To make up for the ascending costs, Sanders said he increased the winery’s bottled wine prices by $1 each. Wines now range from $13 to $18 per bottle, with the most expensive being the cabernet sauvignon. Wine tastings, boasting six original wines and two imported bubbly ones, are still free, as they have been since the winery opened.
Sanders remains optimistic about the winery’s success and recovery from the pandemic, especially through its live concerts and weddings, he said.
“Wineries are more than just wineries,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s in Pahrump or Nantucket or the Finger Lakes.”
Inflation set new records, with the consumer price index — which measures the cost of food, housing, gasoline and other goods — in January growing by 7.5% compared to the year-ago level. This was the largest inflation jump in 40 years, and prices were up 0.9% in the same month.
Some scientists and economists theorize climate change is also a culprit of inflation. Wine especially is a target for major shortages, which would cause an increase in fruit or bottled wine prices, as wine grapes are a commodity sensitive to variations in temperature and precipitation.
In 2020, grapes in the California Napa Valley region were scorched by wildfires. As the Southwest U.S. grows hotter and drier, some areas may have climates inhabitable for the product that made them famous.
But winery owners like Sanders are holding tight to the evolving wine scene in Southern Nevada, one that boasts just a handful of wineries.
“People come to enjoy themselves, and we give them no reason not to,” Sanders said.
The repercussions of inflation are also hitting Vegas Valley Winery, in the Arts District in downtown Las Vegas. Vegas Valley Winery does not have a local vineyard, importing all its grapes from California, like Sanders, as well as international markets in Chile and South Africa for its wine school, owner Mike Schoenbaechler said.
Schoenbaechler said that when he ordered glass bottles in May 2021, he paid twice as much as he did two years ago. The bottles didn’t arrive until the second week of January, he said, a delay that forced the business to postpone bottling of some wines and to draw from its reserves.
The wines instead sat in their barrels for longer than their necessary year and a half to two years, though Schoenbaechler said this slightly extended process will not adversely affect the taste or quality. To limit further delays, the wine’s bottle aging timeline will decrease, Schoenbaechler said. At the winery, wines typically bottle age for a year, though cutting that resting time does not significantly alter the taste either.
“My biggest challenge right now is just trying to not run out of a certain kind of wine without having something to replace it,” he said. “Let’s say that we run out of a red wine. We want to be able to release another red wine right about the same time … so we can still serve the same amount of wines in the tasting room.”
Meanwhile, shipping from other countries grew to five to six times more expensive, he said. Schoenbaechler forecasts that shipping and fruit costs for the California grapes will also be drastically higher, though the harvest period in the state is late summer to early fall, meaning prices will not be set until then. The exact increase will also depend on the harvest season yield.
“You have to be super flexible and able to adapt to what the environment is,” he said. “The thing I’m concerned with most currently and in the near future is the inflation, the cost of all of the goods to produce the wine to bottle it, as well as the cost of the fruit.”
Walking along his vineyard in Pahrump, Sanders recounted another change for the winery: fewer grape vines with more room to grow. Sanders will plant the grapes farther apart and allow the vines to stretch their arms three times as long, a switch from the winery’s previous tactic, which required more frequent vines that grew just five feet wide. This will produce more grapes and require less water, Sanders said.
When back inside the tasting room, he poured glasses of chardonnay and merlot while accompanied by Charlie, a short gray dog with butterfly-wing ears.
“I look at it as a retirement hobby, and it’s so much fun,” he said. “It’s a very romantic business to be in. … We want to see the winery industry grow.”
