Winning never tasted so good

DAYTON - The Sonoma Valley would be hard pressed to beat the views and atmosphere of the Mission Mountain Winery. And that's not even talking about the vino itself.

Montana's oldest winery calls the west shores of Flathead Lake in Dayton home and they aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

"I've been here so long, we basically cater to everybody," owner Tom Campbell said from behind the bar in the winery's tasting room. "We have requests from people for this and that. Our first wine was the Riesling and it's taken an international award every year."

Fresh off winning two gold medals for their Monster Red and the winery's staple, the Riesling, MMW owner Tom Campbell is still going strong. He's created and offers 21 varieties of wine and is ever-expanding as customers come in with suggestions or requests for types they'd like Campbell to create.

"I was told in the beginning that I had a good palate, but you need to translate that skill into producing wines I like," Campbell said. "I'm always learning and the public tastes are always changing. Red wines are out edging whites by a small margin. People have been exposed to more wines now. It's estimated that there are 60,000 wine labels and varieties available to the U.S. market."

Wine connoisseurs will be able to come in and taste different varieties this weekend during Saturday's Dayton Daze.

The tasting room will be open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., just like it is seven days a week (even on holidays) from May 1 to Oct. 31. If you're arriving in Dayton by boat, you can pull up close enough to visit the winery, where Campbell and tasting room manager Cheryl Tassemeyer will be expounding the beauties of the four "s's": swirl, sniff, sip and savor.

Campbell learned much of what he knows while studying viticulture and enology at the University of California-Davis, the preeminent wine school in the nation. He worked at other wineries in the Northwest before deciding with his father to try growing grapes on property the family owned in Dayton.

Located along U.S. Highway 93, along which some estimates say two million cars travel each year, Campbell has tourists and locals alike stop in to try and buy some of his varieties. Available across the state of Montana, Campbell has adapted to a smaller market. He sells approximately five or 6,000 cases per year, mostly to your average Montanan who enjoys a delicious wine. He said his prices average $10 to $15, while Campbell believes he could sell the same varieties for upwards of $25 per bottle in California.

"I could make more money elsewhere, but if you look out the window, you can see why I like doing it here," Campbell said, chuckling while he pointed to the postcard view of boats on Flathead Lake no more than a few hundred yards from his tasting room. "The wine market is very elastic. There's a shift from higher priced wines to lower priced wines."

Suffice it to say, lower priced doesn't mean lower quality, and Campbell knows his clientele can discern the difference.

"The people of Western Montana are very wine-savvy," he said. "I think you'll find that to be the case from Whitefish to Bozeman. You'll find the wine shops here will have some very interesting wines from around the world."

Campbell has approximately three and a half acres in Dayton for production, as well as several more acres in the Columbia Valley, near Zillah, Wash. He supplements his grape supply with small grape producers from around Flathead Lake, using local products as much as he can, despite a difficult Montana climate. Campbell said the central valley of California produces seven or eight tons of grapes per acre, Washington gets four to five tons per acre while Montana can expect about one and a half tons per acre.

"Because grapes aren't that great a money maker, it becomes more a labor of love," he said. "In Montana, I work with the notion of ‘terroir', a French word relating to how the soil, light and climate come together and create a unique taste in grapes. Then you just have to try to not foul it all up in your winemaking."

If all the awards lining the tasting room, of which Campbell estimates at more than 100, are any indication, Mission Mountain Winery is not fouling it up.