Dune Valley Distillery near national park has long Colorado history
By Eric Peterson
Dune Valley Distillery opened near Great Sands Dunes National Park in Mosca in 2023, but the seed was planted in Denver more than a century earlier. And it came from a California grape.
Dune Valley Distillery
Open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday to Monday. The wine, vodka and rakia are available exclusively at the distillery.
An immigrant from Italy, Anthony Carbone was on his way to the California vineyards back in 1903 when he got a bit sidetracked. “Back in the day to get to California, you had to travel to Denver,” said Nicholas Chambers, Carbone’s great-grandson and the founder of Dune Valley Distillery. “So he stopped over and realized it was a good market out here in the West.”
It follows that his Carbone & Company made wine until pausing for Prohibition, then resumed winemaking in 1933. “That was when Carbone wine really took off,” Chambers said. “They were bringing in fresh grapes and grape must from California vineyards because, of course, the Colorado wine scene hadn’t started yet.”
The Denver winery shuttered in the 1950s with the sale of Carbone & Company, but it wasn’t the bitter end for the label. After more than 60 years of hibernation, Chambers resurrected the Carbone brand in 2019 with the help of his late mother, Claudia Carbone, and Palisade winemakers Talbott Farms and Sauvage Spectrum. “We’ve got a chardonnay and a rosé with Talbott’s, and a red blend with Sauvage Spectrum,” Chambers said.
The still at Dune Valley Distillery
The wines are now under the umbrella of Dune Valley Distillery, which makes vodka and other spirits in Mosca, which is in the heart of the San Luis Valley. The distillery emerged following Chambers’ long career in local food. As the founding general manager of Valley Roots Food Hub in Mosca, he saw an opportunity right next door: a 1930s-era gymnasium long abandoned by the Sangre de Cristo School District.
The vision coalesced about five years ago. “The food hub operates out of a potato plant, out back is North America’s capital of quinoa, and next door was the old gym that was abandoned and boarded up,” Chambers said. “And it was just like, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be cool to reinvigorate that building?’”
Once the plan for a distillery was cemented, toasts from a bottle of French quinoa vodka soon helped seal the deal with Mosca’s White Mountain Farm, the country’s first large-scale quinoa grower, as a supplier. The gymnasium-turned-distillery is now part of a campus that also encompasses Valley Roots and its Root Cellar Market.
Dune Valley Distillery’s quinoa vodka has emerged as a favorite because of its distinctive flavor, Chambers said. “It’s been really popular. I cannot keep it on the shelf. People have been likening it to tequila. It’s got this earthy, smoky flavor. I’m not smoking it or doing anything special,” he continued. “We’re in the era of vodkas with a terroir. It’s not a neutral spirit by any means. Our potato vodka is full of vanilla and butterscotch.”
The distillery also makes rakia – a brandy that originated in the Balkans – with surplus fruit from the Western Slope. “We have tremendous fruit production up on the Western Slope … and we’re frequently in oversupply,” he said. “It was kind of a traditional thing to be able to store the harvest when the fruit is dropping off the trees in a perishable form, and you really need to capture and put it into something that’s non-perishable.”
Dune Valley Distillery hosts a number of dinners and special events that showcase the San Luis Valley’s prodigious agricultural output. “We have a really amazing community of local farmers and ranchers,” Chambers said. “Speaking to agriculture is really how it’s all rooted.”
Eric Peterson is a freelance writer who covers travel, business, and real estate, as well as Colorado’s craft beverage industry. Eric lives in Denver with his wife, Jamie, and their faithful mutts, Aoife and Ogma.